2.
KNOWLEDGE KEEPS CHANGING

Despite the speed of change in the world generally, we often rely on our existing knowledge to understand it, even when that may not be useful or accurate. Perceptions or facts about the world may be static in our minds, even though they are changing dramatically all the time.

In May 2013 Swedish professor Hans Rosling asked 1,000 British people to take a test on population growth. The questions were deceptively straightforward, such as:

How many children do UN experts estimate there will be by the year 2100? What percentage of adults in the world today are literate – i.e. can read and write? What is the life expectancy in the world as a whole today?

If you did the questionnaire, you might be surprised to find that you knew less about the world than chimpanzees. As Rosling explains: “If for each question I wrote each of the possible alternatives on bananas, and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, by picking the right bananas, they’d just pick bananas at random.”⁴³

A striking fact in Rosling’s findings is that the pollsters with university education did not do any better, and sometimes even worse, than the general population, including some of his university professor colleagues. Rosling’s research provides a reality check about the world, and shows how most people are ignorant about the ways the world is changing for the better. His research also reveals how we rely on preconceived ideas that are years, or sometimes decades, out of date. As the world is changing so rapidly, we increasingly find ourselves in situations where what we know, or what we thought we knew, is no longer useful or correct.

Take the rapid progress of knowledge itself. If we think about anatomy at the time of Vesalius, whose story appears earlier (see page 34), how could a book about how the body worked survive 1,400 years as being the gospel truth?

American scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that at the current rate of scientific progress, we’ll make the same amount of progress as occurred in the 20th century in 14 years, and then again in seven years. This is 1,000 times faster progress than the progress achieved in the 20th century. He also predicts that in 15 years’ time the internet will contain all accessible human knowledge.⁴⁴ Knowledge seems to be expanding at an accelerating pace.

You would think that the more that knowledge expands, the more we know, and by definition, the less we don’t know. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes that the total universe of knowable things is fixed.