My family immigrated to America in 1983 from Bhopal, a city in India. I was thirteen. In India, I had my own transistor radio, a bicycle, a rotary phone, and a black and white television. Back then, time moved the way monsoons move. Things were inevitable, cyclical, and unhurried. I did not know then, that by coming to America, I was crossing not just an ocean, but a temporal fault line. Behind me was a world still largely analog, where change was measured in generations, and ahead of me was a country accelerating into a future it hadn’t yet named.
I have spent the forty-three years since trying to reconcile those two clocks. And during the last 5 years, the clock itself may have changed shape.
The long nineteenth century
To most Americans today, the long hundred years between 1800 and 1900 now seem ancient at this point. During that span, humanity gave itself the railroad, the telegraph and telephone, electric light, photography, the phonograph, and the automobile. These were civilizational achievements, each requiring decades to move from laboratory curiosity to household fixture. The telephone, patented in 1876, took the better part of a century to become something close to universal. Mass adoption took seventy-five years, a glacial pace almost impossible to imagine today. Electricity took decades to move from Edison’s demonstrations to rural households. Change, in that century, was generational. A person could be born, raise children, and die within the same basic technological envelope as their grandparents.
The twentieth century
Then came the twentieth century, which packed a comparable density of discovery into a single hundred-year span rather than requiring several: the airplane, radio and television, the transistor, nuclear energy, the discovery of DNA’s structure, and eventually the computer and the internet. The unit of change shrank from the century to the decade, and by the century’s end, to the year. Television took roughly a quarter-century to reach mass penetration in American households, which, by today’s standards, was still a leisurely climb.
2000 – 2020: two decades that rivaled a century
Now consider the 2000s. Between 2000 and 2020, just twenty years, the volume of consumer-facing technological adoption rivaled what had taken the entire twentieth century to produce. Facebook, launched in 2004, needed about four years to reach 100 million users. Instagram, launched in 2010, took roughly two and a half years. The unit of change had shrunk again, from the year to the month.
The last five years
And then, something happened between 2020 to 2025, that we have yet to fully metabolize. Generative AI moved from research-lab novelty to a tool used by hundreds of millions of people. Autonomous AI agents began handling multi-step tasks once reserved for junior analysts. Spatial computing and mixed reality left the demo stage. Quantum computing crossed credible thresholds of practical relevance. Humanoid and industrial robotics advanced from viral videos to deployed pilot fleets. TikTok had already shown that a platform could reach 100 million users in nine months rather than years. But ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI in November 2022, reached that same milestone in roughly two months, the fastest ramp ever recorded. By 2026, ChatGPT had crossed one billion monthly active users, the fastest any consumer application in history has reached that scale. OpenAI’s annualized revenue, meanwhile, climbed from roughly ten billion dollars in mid-2025 to more than twenty-five billion within about eight months, a financial acceleration that mirrors the user acceleration.
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Compress this another way: the telephone took seventy-five years to reach the world. ChatGPT took two months. That is not an incremental improvement in the pace of adoption, but a different physics of time.
What is changing?
I lived the analog world through the lens of a childhood in a country then classified among the world’s poorest, which is precisely why I feel such kinship today with the large part of humanity still living, by necessity or circumstance, closer to that older clock. Then I watched the same world accelerate through American teenage eyes, arriving just as the pace of technological advancement was beginning to compound. Through the 1980s and even the 1990s, it was still possible to keep up, to read a magazine article about a new technology and have time to understand it before it became part of your daily life. That grace period, I believe, ended sometime in the last five years. The imaginative furniture of science fiction, the Jetsons’ domestic robots, Star Wars’ droids and hover-technology, has quietly relocated from the realm of fiction into the realm of procurement catalogs.
Where are we heading?
In the next five years, AGI, artificial general intelligence, a system capable of matching or exceeding human performance across most cognitive tasks, will likely emerge first from one of a small handful of frontier labs. When it does, the disruption to cognitive labor will not be gradual, but structural. We are already watching the financial markets price this belief in real time. As of August 2026, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon have each traded above or near the four-to-five-trillion-dollar mark at various points this year, with Nvidia becoming the first company in history to cross five trillion dollars in market capitalization and Apple briefly overtaking it for the same distinction weeks later. Whether the eventual number is twenty trillion or thirty, the pattern the market is betting on is concentration: a small number of AI-native or AI-transformed companies capturing an outsized share of global economic value.
While this future is not yet visible in the form that the hype may suggest, we can see the pattern. In pharmaceutical research, generative AI has compressed timelines that once took years into months. Insilico Medicine’s rentosertib, an AI-designed molecule for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, moved from target identification to Phase I trials in roughly eighteen months, and by 2026 more than a hundred AI-originated therapeutic candidates were in human trials. But as of this writing, no AI-discovered drug has yet won full regulatory approval, and the odds of a first approval by 2027 is still a coin flip tilted only slightly in favor. With that said, 2026 may be the last year when we can still see real and dramatic acceleration sitting alongside real and unresolved uncertainty about whether the acceleration will translate into durable human benefit.
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The treadmill beneath the acceleration
There is a second force at work here, one that has nothing to do with the speed of invention and everything to do with how our mind works. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill: the tendency of a mind, and of a society, to metabolize any improvement in circumstance so completely that the improvement disappears from felt experience, leaving only the appetite for the next one. For example, lottery winners report, within a year or two, roughly the same life satisfaction they reported before the windfall. Similarly, I no longer compare my life to 1983 because I compare it to yesterday, and to my neighbor’s feed.
Consider what now sits in nearly every pocket in America: a device holding more computing power than guided the Apollo missions, capable of translating forty languages in real time, capable of producing, within seconds, a diagnosis-grade reading of a skin lesion or a second opinion on a biopsy. A boy born in India in 1970, or a version of me who never crossed that ocean, would have called any one of these things sorcery. Today, it feels like a normal Tuesday.
During the pandemic, mRNA platforms that took decades to theorize were compressed into a working vaccine in under a year. And while examples of such abundance arrive, the baseline rises to swallow them, and somehow the average American reports feeling less secure, not more, than parents who had none of it.
This is the trap that the thirteen-year-old version of me did not have to think about, because in the old physics of time, the miracles arrived slowly enough that gratitude had time to register before the goalposts moved. Ours now arrive so fast that we are perpetually, structurally underwhelmed. We have built a civilization that manufactures wonder faster than any human nervous system, calibrated for monsoon-time, knows how to feel it.
The reckoning ahead
If the pattern holds, the next decade will make the 1980s feel not merely dated but ancient, a memory as distant, relative to the felt experience of time, as two centuries once felt. A tsunami of change is coming. Technology will keep accelerating and, this time, we may not have the luxury to build the civic, ethical, and economic scaffolding to absorb it. The waves will not break gently to those of us who grew up in the analog world. And even if they did, I suspect we would adjust to the calm within a year or two, and start asking what the ocean had done for us lately.
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I cruise back and forth between optimism and pessimism about the near future. The optimistic scenario ends in wonder: AI systems finally delivering on the long-promised cures for the diseases that have outrun conventional drug discovery for a generation, cognitive tools that free people to do more meaningfully human work, prosperity distributed rather than concentrated. There is another version that ends in vertigo: a world of innocence and unhurried attention displaced faster than our institutions, our children, or our own nervous systems can adjust. And there is a third possibility in which the miracles simply arrive, get absorbed, and vanish into the baseline before we have even thanked them. The deciding question of the next century may not be whether we invent the cure, but whether we remain capable of noticing it once we have.
I really do not know which version we are living. I suspect we are living all three, simultaneously, depending on where you stand and what you have access to. What I know is this: the boy who arrived in 1983 with a slow, forgiving sense of time would not recognize the velocity of the world my grandson Henry is inheriting. Our grandchildren will adapt to the rapid pace of change better than us, and the treadmill will adapt with them, resetting their sense of ordinary a little faster with every marvel it absorbs. The next generation will keep up, but will they remember how to be human at this speed? Will they still find a way to let the wonder register before the goalposts move again?
To be continued…