It seems like things are happening so fast these days that no issue gets fully (or partially) resolved, or even fully understood, before something new grabs the public’s attention and runs with it.

Maybe this is what is meant by the concepts of fugue or singularity, the futurist’s terms for a time when technology is driving social change and information transfer so quickly and automatically that human institutions cannot keep up with it and manage it any more.

The term is usually applied to a hypothetical future when all decision making is handed over to digital systems because humans simply cannot react fast enough to absorb the information, process it, and then respond appropriately. The corollary of course, is that if any situation materializes that is not anticipated by those who program the software, the entire system seizes up and either implodes catastrophically or initiates a cascade of chaos. Software systems speed up their ability to process information exponentially, but the speed of thought is biologically constrained. Sooner or later, the curves must intersect.

We have always foreseen this condition precipitating in some indeterminate future, when we have handed over one too many of our control functions to automated systems. But human institutions “think” even slower than the individual people who make them up. When it hits the fan, I’m afraid we will all be perfectly aware of what is happening, and what needs to be done to deal with it, but will still be helpless to do anything about it.