In 1960 a Famous Futurist created a law on long run effects of technology — Don’t adopt new technology for the sake of it being new technology

Most people just don’t understand the real impact of technology.

They actually end up overestimating the impact — but only in the short run. This happens because folks get excited about adopting new technology, this makes them want to think of as many early use cases and this causes “inattentional blindness” where folks are unable to really gauge the negatives and positives.

So, during the early stages, the negative impacts are totally ignored and in the long run, an ocean of forgotten negatives may fall on people.

The Famous Futurist Law:

Amara’s Law sums this up nicely — We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Here are two impacts:

As the pace of tech adoption grows — this law will grow in importance

We are moving into a world where the technology adoption cycles will accelerate because the pace of innovation is accelerating.

Such change will cause more events to occur due to rapid global changes to occur. The spread of information at a faster pace will increase the speed of decision-making. This will eventually make History Rhyme more frequently.

So, we are moving into a world where long-run effects will be felt more quickly — meaning the negatives of technology may hit us faster.

Faster EV adoption will have side effects that came at us more quickly

The Russia-Ukraine War is most likely to increase the pace of EV adoption and that will have long-term impacts.

Giga Berlin is already gearing up to make 2 million cars in Europe. This would make Tesla the largest overall automaker in Europe with a single factory.

This could lead to negative effects like excess battery waste due to no recycling or an increase in cyber crimes because FSD created too much free time.

Remember Amara’s Law!

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