"It feels like we are starting to catch up with the effects of fast-paced technological progress and its social and cultural impact, and not all our responses are in line with the openness, fluidity, and connectedness that [technology] enables and promotes, but rather the opposite: nationalism, xenophobia, racism, closed borders, and so on," Wolf says.
The fast pace of technological progress lowered production costs and boosted demand, but also made it easier for new entrants to join the market.
This is all the more important because there will be incredibly fast and vast technological progress in the years to come that will open up new dimensions of warfare to state and non-state actors.
"In the last decade we've probably had the fastest rate of technological progress that we've ever seen and yet we've seen a 50% increase in rail travel," he explained.
This has been made possible by both technological progress (faster computers) and the construction of necessary theoretical tools for multi-objective optimization: although it is simple to compare two solutions when considering a single objective, it becomes more complicated when considering several objectives.
Dubbed "The Hartwell Paper," the 12-person team of scientists and policy thinkers who wrote the report emphasize technological progress over fast deployment of off-the-shelf technology.
Nevertheless, the ICT revolution has made technological progress both fast and volatile so that we have to use 'intelligence' and assess lab-stage technologies with regards to their potential impact on both energy supply and demand.
It's harder to say what has happened in the last few hundred years, when technological progress has been fastest, because it's such a short span of time.
If you think that the pace of technological progress is already too fast, you'd better not look at e-book readers.
The good news is that technological progress is being made faster than anyone ever dreamed possible.
