Technology has always been humanity’s most powerful lever for transformation. From the moment our ancestors struck stone against stone to fashion the first tools, to the moment the Wright brothers lifted off in 1903, to the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon just 66 years later — progress has never stood still.

But what distinguishes our time from all others is the pace and power of technological change. For millions of years, human life looked largely the same. A child born and an elder dying would live within an unchanged technological landscape. Today, the opposite is true. Most of us will witness, within a single lifetime, innovations so profound that they were unimaginable at our birth.

The Spiral of History

Max Roser’s brilliant visualization from Our World in Data captures this beautifully. The history of technology begins with the first stone tools 3.4 million years ago, spiraling forward through fire, agriculture, writing, and the wheel. For millennia, innovation crawled. Thousands of years separated one life-altering invention from the next.

Then, something shifted. The Industrial Revolution compressed the timeline. Within a few generations, we invented electricity, vaccines, flight, and computing. By the 20th century, the pace had become exponential. The leap from the Wright brothers’ fragile flyer to humans standing on the lunar surface occurred not across millennia, but in the span of a single human life.

The Power and Peril of AI

Today, we stand on the threshold of a new epoch — the age of artificial intelligence. Unlike past innovations, AI is unique in that it is not simply another tool; it is a multiplier of intelligence itself. If intelligence is the engine of invention, then AI is jet fuel.

This means that the decades-long arcs of past technologies could soon collapse into years, or even months. We are already seeing early signs: AI drafting medical records in seconds, predicting disease risk from genetic and phenotypic data, designing new drugs, and transforming the way patients engage with healthcare.

But this acceleration comes with profound challenges. With power this immense, the question of who develops and controls AI is not merely technical — it is political, ethical, and existential. To leave such decisions solely to technologists is to abdicate one of the most important responsibilities of our age.

What Healthcare Can Learn

For healthcare, this history of acceleration offers three urgent lessons:

• Don’t underestimate the speed of change. Hospitals and health systems that plan in decades may find themselves irrelevant in years if they fail to adopt exponential technologies.
• Every innovation is double-edged. Just as vaccines eradicated smallpox while nuclear weapons threatened annihilation, AI offers both healing and harm. Responsible governance is non-negotiable.
• The future must be co-created. Clinicians, patients, policymakers, and innovators all need a seat at the table. The technologies that define health, longevity, and well-being should not be left to a narrow few.

Imagining Tomorrow

Our great-great-grandparents would be awestruck by antibiotics, smartphones, or the International Space Station circling above our planet. What will our great-grandchildren look back on in awe? A world without cancer? A fully digitized, patient-owned health twin? Radical life extension?

One thing is certain: if history has taught us anything, it is that the unimaginable will soon become the inevitable. Our task is to ensure that when it does, it bends toward equity, well-being, and human flourishing.

We stand at the green edge of Roser’s spiral — where history hands us the pen to write the next turn. Let us write wisely.