The Power of Animation, History As A Book

Animation is a wonderful way of explaining ideas which are too big, too small or too complex for people to understand. Taking the example of the history of the human species this animation represents the amount of time we’ve been on this planet and what the significant achievements have been for our species.

“Social media platforms are designed to manipulate our behaviour, keeping us hooked and constantly seeking validation. We need to reclaim our attention and use it mindfully.”

Tristan Harris 2023

Imagine human history were written in a big 1,000-page book. Every page would cover 250 years. If we tore out all the pages, it would look like this. The very earliest permanent settlements started around page 760 and recorded history doesn’t start until around page 775 (Tim Urban)

Looking at history via animation reminds us that we are living in an insane anomaly. Technology as a ‘tool’ has underpinned rising living standards, new cures for diseases and other blessings.
But this animation also illustrates, alarmingly, that we’ve now crossed the technological threshold, where we have the power to destroy ourselves ironically through the
democratisation of tech. (Elon Musk)

This democratization of technology is truly remarkable, yet it carries a profound dark side. It has become alarmingly easy to create pathogens with the potential to claim the lives of millions, if not billions, of people. We ‘lost’ our first contact with AI the ‘curation’ phase.

“Animation offers an unparalleled medium of storytelling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world. It is a means of expressing our feelings, our emotions, and our imaginations.”

Walt Disney 1953

Yet via Chat GPT 4 we’re racing toward our second contact the ‘creative’ phase with no clue as to where it will take us as a species. (Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin)

Our own ingenuity has propelled us into an unprecedented realm, uncharted and uncertain.

Regrettably, there is no dedicated administration tasked with overseeing these matters, nor is there substantial allocation of resources to address these concerns. We find ourselves in a state of denial, wading through the shallows of decadence and superficiality. (Matthew Syed)

Life, with its beauty and preciousness, represents a fleeting illumination of existence before we fade into an infinite night. We possess the intelligence required to confront the dangers that lie before us, but do we possess the wisdom? The challenge is that ‘our emotional makeup harkens back to the Palaeolithic era, our institutions lag behind those of the medieval period, and yet our technology has reached god-like proportions’. (E.O. Wilson).

And what began that entire rant? Animation which conveyed complex if not incoherent and incomprehensible information in a crisp and relatable way.

Here’s the call to action folks…

“We need to be asking ourselves some hard questions about the impact of technology on our lives, our relationships, and our societies. We need to be proactive in shaping the future we want to create, rather than simply reacting to the latest technological developments.”

Fun Facts

Cybersecurity Risks: The rapid advancement of AI technology also brings new cybersecurity challenges. A report by Capgemini in 2023 highlighted that 69% of organizations surveyed had experienced an AI-related breach in the past year.

Job Displacement: The Future of Jobs Report 2023 by the World Economic Forum Geneva, Switzerland, 1 May 2023 – suggests that almost a quarter of jobs (23%) are expected to change in the next five years. According to the estimates of the 803 companies surveyed for the report, employers anticipate 69 million new jobs to be created and 83 million eliminated among the 673 million jobs corresponding to the dataset, a net decrease of 14 million jobs, or 2% of current employment.

“Crows can solve puzzles, and they don’t have language. They’re not doing it by storing strings of symbols and manipulating them. They’re doing it by changing the strengths of connections between neurons in their brain. And so it has to be possible to learn complicated things by changing the strengths of connections in an artificial neural network.”