2025: The Limit of Thought?

 A number of dates have been proposed over the years for the end of the world. Jesus estimated two thousand years ago that the apocalypse would be coming any day now. Sir Thomas Browne, writing more than sixteen hundred years after that, said it was "too late to be ambitious"—because the demise of human civilization was due at any moment. Two hundred years after that, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote (perhaps more metaphorically) that the world was imminently bound to "fall asunder, being old." 

Closer to our own time, many people looked to the year 2000 as a nice round number on which the world might choose to end. When the Y2K apocalypse failed to materialize, many New Age types turned to the Mayan Calendar to suggest that the end times were due in 2012. They even got a Hollywood movie out of the premise. 

I hadn't ever heard someone propose our current year as the inevitable terminus, however. Indeed, I didn't think anyone had ever made the year 2025 out to be symbolically important—or even cool and futuristic-sounding. There was no movie called 2025: A Space Odyssey. 

Or so I thought. But in Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, the author notes in passing an eye-catching fact about Henry Adams's famous theory of the "rule of phase in history"—which shines a spotlight on our current year. 

Summarizing Adams's thesis, Bell explains that Adams sought to reduce the "laws of thought" to a rule of statistics. Specifically, he thought that a series of "phase-shifts" could be charted in the progress of human mental development, and that these occurred with a certain mathematical regularity. Adams did not regard this progression as linear, however—but as exponential. This meant that the periods between each new phase-shift were shrinking each time, according to the law of inverse squares. 

This meant, in Adams's telling, that the exponential curve of human thought was approaching some sort of vertical limit. And he clocked the year in which this limit would be "reached" (for all intents and purposes) at 2025, specifically (at least according to Bell). So, sometime this year—if Adams's mathematical law is to be trusted—we should be shortly reaching the "limit of human thought"—assuming we have not done so already. 

Obviously, Adams's theory is a big pseudo-scientific crock. But it is a fun crock, for all that. And I happen to think it rings subjectively true (though maybe it would ring subjectively true in any year, since we always seem to feel our earth is on the precipice). It feels very much like we are approaching two vertical asymptotes—and it is indeed hard to imagine a clear way past either. 

One is the exponential growth in the development of generative AI. The other is the limit we appear to be approaching in how unstable and chaotic our polarized national politics can become without bringing on some sort of world economic or military crisis. (Just how many U.S. allies and friendly nations can Donald Trump needlessly antagonize, before he actually does succeed in breaking down the equilibrium of our current world order?) It makes sense that people would be feeling that we are indeed turning ever faster in Yeats's "widening gyre" right now. 

So, is this the year we reach the limit of thought? Is this the year the world ends? Probably not really. There is actually no real evidence that "thought"—or any other human cultural achievement—has truly been developing in an exponential way. Even AI technology—the recent development of which has been spinning all of our heads—had actually plateaued for a long period before its current growth spurt. There is no reason to assume it will continue to develop in a straight vertical line from here. 

But this idea of an unstoppable exponential acceleration in the rapidity of social and technological change, which Adams's "rule of phase" captures, certainly does ring true at an emotional level. We are all feeling pretty alarmed this year by the sense that a number of the previously stable equilibria of our world seem to be coming undone—and we don't know how much chaos will be unleashed before some new equilibrium—some new stable "phase"—is reached. 

It's hard to imagine how all this Trump madness and all this generative AI madness can continue before something fundamental comes undone. And what's worse, all of this change seems to be happening faster and faster, in just the way Adams's law of acceleration predicts. Many of us, then, entering upon such a world of exponentially growing technologies and completely unstable expectations for the future, may find ourselves resonating with Robert Frost's plaintive cry: "Bounds should be set/To ingenuity for being so cruel/ In bringing change unheralded[.]"