How much has changed since the year 2000? Since 1950? And how much will change again by 2050? By 2100?

Is there an objective way to measure the "rate of change" between two years? Daniel Susskind's Growth comes to mind when I think about this question, as he dramatically laid out for the reader in the opening sections how drastically human quality of life has changed since 1840, and how little it had changed in the tens of thousands of years previously.

Of course economics is one lens through which to frame this question, but there's an undeniable vibe factor to the prompt as well. We can point to all sorts of technologies, political realities, and cultural expectations that have changed between 1950 and today, but is it the absolute change that is so striking or the rate of change?

Take my career in the semiconductor industry. In 1950, semiconductors barely existed, with the first working transistor invented on December 16, 1947. 75 years later, chip designers have literally reached the physical limits of transistors at the atomic scale, necessitating novel advanced packaging techniques. Photonics are also big business, with engineers trying to harness the properties of light to move so much data around.

But how much has changed in semiconductors between 2000 and 2025? Moore's Law has been in effect and well known the entire time, so there's probably no great surprise to someone in 2000 that by 2025 transistor sizes are so small; they may marvel at the engineering, but the phenomena could be well understood. But what about the use of the chips for AI? The application dates back to Alan Turing, and there were some false starts in the 80s and 90s. But likely no one in the 2000s could have envisioned the degree to which AI has become the next great infrastructural build out of our generation.

What's particularly exciting, mystical, and relevant to the prompt is that it is also equally unclear where things go next! Sure there are the investors, founders, and technologists who are certain the ways in which AI will transform our lives. But there are also plenty of skeptics and plenty of those in the middle. No doubt, if we are to think about where society is in 2050, one scenario we must at least try to envision is that economic relations have been absolutely transformed by AI.

In some ways, however, things stay so much the same. A foreign policy observer in the year 2000 would likely have extolled the virtues of democracy and noted how the Cold War definitively marked the beginning of the end for illiberal regimes. 25 years later, and many (including myself) are still in a state of shock at just how far the freedoms that were so desperately fought for over the past century are steadily eroding away.

Relatedly, cultural and gender relations seem to ebb and flow in their own cadences as well. There are certainly individual freedoms and lifestyles today that someone in the year 1950 would be astounded by, though less so someone in the 2000s. But there is an enormous wave of conservatism in modern politics that isn't out of place to previous moments in the 1950s and 1980s. Once again old themes are playing out in modern contexts.

We’ve come a long way since the William Shockley & Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1947

So Azeem asks, "how will I look at the world differently?", keeping these frames of reference in mind.

Reflecting on my brief analysis above, it reminds me of the classic lesson I was taught by Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis many years ago - one must be able to hold two conflicting ideas in their head at the same time.

It strikes me as true both that we can be so rapidly wrong-footed by unexpected technological leaps and that we find ourselves returning to the same themes of power, oppression, and scarcity that have marked millennia of human activity.

Looking to the future then, the challenge is how to find the same themes amidst an always evolving paradigm. How can we anticipate the surprising facets of our future knowing that some persistent themes of humanity are likely to remain? Is the change of context too radical for us to ponder, or does the continuity of human behavior provide us the tools to harness our future?

1950s science fiction was rife with ideas about what the future would look like. We can laugh now, looking at the Jetsons and similar sci-fi of the era that was perhaps naive, rose colored view on how automated and futuristic the world would look (even though some ideas hold true). Forward looking media of the period was often quite optimistic in how technology would progress the human spirit and mission.

Might we look at today's bleak, dystopian sci-fi and look back with the same humor and bemusement that we could have been so wrong about a future so bright?

When I think about the world in 2050, let alone 2100, I have no doubt that technology will continue to surprise us in its capabilities, hopefully for the upside.

Whether that future is positive or negative, I am more certain, lies in our collective ability to reflect on, and learn from the basic building blocks of human interaction that we’ve known about for thousands of years. Will we choose a future that highlights the needs of the few over the many? That concentrates power or devolves it? Seeing the ebbs and flows of the past 75 years, let alone the centuries before, has assured me that we’ll continue to see the best and worst impulses of humanity, but that we are more than up to the task of finding solutions.