At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Callum Parks, Longitude fellow from Rice University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Jim Jubelirer, the Owner of Jubelirer Results Group, and he will be speaking to us about progress and its rate of exponential growth.

My name is Jim Jubelirer. I’m the owner of Jubelirer Results Group based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I have a workshop entitled Exponential Mindset and why now is the best time in human history to be alive. Wait, now’s the best time in human history to be alive? Look at all the news. Look how bad things are. Look how many people are struggling? Yes, the pandemic has been hard. And in no way do I mean to minimize that. But when you look at the facts and the data across the world about the rate of progress in human history, you see that the long arc of human history bends towards progress, and people do want to have a better life. Let’s look at the last major pandemic that people talk about the Spanish Flu of 1918. It killed the equivalent of 60,000,000. 60 million people worldwide. Far, far more deadly than the current coronavirus. What’s happened in the 100 years since that pandemic? Around the world, income has tripled, and human longevity has doubled. People are living twice as long. Right now, the race to find vaccines and get everyone vaccinated is the single largest public health project in human history by many orders of magnitude. So yes, there are inequalities. Yes, there are risks, but at the same time, we become blind to all the progress that’s happening, simply because we don’t see it. Why is that? In part, it’s because our minds are hardwired to be on the lookout for threats from the environment. It’s how we’ve survived as a species. That’s called the negativity bias, and news, entertainment and politics take advantage of the negativity bias to capture our time, our attention, our money, and our votes. If it bleeds, it leads. Did you know that violence is at an all time low, human to human, inter-country civil war, between country war, state sanctioned war, terrorism, etc, are at an all-time low. But you wouldn’t know that because every night there are stories about violence and mayhem. So over time, we get a distorted picture of the progress that’s happening.

Progress itself is growing at an exponential rate. There’s something called Moore’s Law, which was developed by the inventor of the semiconductor chip, that states that computer power doubles every 18 months. And that’s been true for 50 years. And when you apply Moore’s Law to things like solar energy, a solar energy is basically just a computer chip, it’s a silicone chip. It’s also doubling every 18 months. So if you go out 10 years from now, the ability to produce electricity from the sun is going to be virtually free. Entire new industries are going to exist that we don’t even have today. So I do say now is the best time in human history to be alive. One million people a day are getting access to the internet for the very first time, all over the world, but particularly in developed countries. And when people join the online world, they escape poverty, they escape repression, they get educated, they become literate, they lift their standards up. More people have left crushing poverty this century in the past 20 years than in the whole of humanity up till this century. So exponential progress is increasing at an exponential rate.

Callum Parks, Longitude fellow, Rice University: