It's not tech acceleration. It's an avalanche

I'm reading the printed Financial Times and Daily Mail - for the first time in maybe 10 years. 

Courtesy of Austrian Airlines, who offers wifi, but internet connection not working, so only static content is available (i.e. scanned newspapers). 

Very interesting experience. The gap between online and offline content is amazing.

The printed version is interesting. But... static. No search /filter /browse. Not summarizable. No right-click for additional details, or research /deep search. 

This is a good moment to realize how fast our world is changing. Today's society is significantly different from 10 years ago. The tools used now are so different. It's not only a change between generations. A 10 year gap in learning /re-training is now enormous: it makes you obsolete.

THIS TRANSFORMATION made me change significantly my view on the speed of history, and tech acceleration.

Until a few years ago, I thought that the acceleration was an illusion. A time bias, when we consider recent events as more important than distant events. A kind of speed fallacy, where the nearest objects seem faster than distant objects. I thought that 50k years ago, innovation was as fast as today, but we cannot see it from our distance. (Except for propagation, which obviously was much slower - information travelled by foot, not by internet).

I no longer believe that the transformation is linear.

SEE: there was almost no difference between the tools used 1 mil years ago, and 100k years ago. We used pretty much the same stone tools, or pottery. If you woke up after 5k years, your life wouldn't change very much.

There was almost no difference between the agriculture of 5k years ago, and 300 years ago. If you woke up in a hundred years, you would use similar tools, and grow similar crops.

BUT if you now work in any blue-collar job (modern farm, retailer, factory, delivery, distribution), you operate robots, drones, and satellites that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Or, if you work in a white-collar job, any job that handles information, then you use email and internet that didn't exist 30 years ago; and E-commerce, CRM, videoconference, cloud, content, collaboration, analytics, and productivity tools that didn't exist 5-10 years ago.

Even more: we use AI today, which didn't exist 1 year ago. 

So, printed newspapers, or any static content, are now anacronic.

Of course some people still read printed news. Well, some people are still hunting and gathering, aren't they. But printed information is already anacronic.

We cannot afford to ignore the technology avalanche. 

We live in a completely new world, every year.