Turning Points

Turning points in sports happen all the time. One team is down by a lot of points, and then they suddenly rally to come from behind—the turning point of the game. It’s supposed to represent the point at which things really change direction.

Besides sports broadcasters and writers, historians also have a penchant for using the term “turning point.” While they might be discussing a turning point within a specific battle, they more often mean an event that changes the course of human history.

One of these much-discussed events is the agricultural revolution, where the popular version of the story goes like this: humans before a certain point in time, maybe 12,000 years ago, people walked around everywhere in order to find food. If there was food close by, they might not have to walk very far, but every day, humans gathered vegetables, nuts, berries, and the like, or killed some kind of animal, or both.

Then, suddenly and all at once, people started farming everywhere, ushering in the agricultural revolution.

Nonsense. This “turning point” was more of a gradual sliding scale, where on one side we have “no farming at all”, and then on the other side we have “modern agriculture.” There wasn’t a switch that was flipped here, but instead millions of little actions that tell a much more complex story.

Here’s that story, about whether there even really was a revolution as such:

However, there are indeed moments where things change much more rapidly. In human history, the more recent, the more rapid.

Why? Because the world is vastly more connected now than it has ever been in the past, and ideas move at the speed of light these days. One of these turning points during my lifetime has surely been the advent of the smartphone.

Why the smartphone? Why not, say, the internet? Well, the internet may have seemed to come about incredibly quickly, but the truth is that it was rolled out in bits and pieces over several decades, starting with the Mother of All Demos in 1968:

No, the smartphone was different to me. While I vaguely understood that there was an internet when I was a kid, it wasn’t until the introduction of the world wide web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and 1990. Even then, it was a few years before the commercial world caught on, and AOL rolled out to Americans a few years later.

No, the internet was a clear case of gradual, then sudden change. On the other hand, 2007 marks a real turning point for computing.

It’s true that I had a smartphone before this year.

It’s also true that the world very quickly woke up to how amazing this technology was—a powerful computer in your pocket that you could use any time, connected to the (now very useful) internet and able to play all sorts of media. Since 2007, smartphone use has changed how most people use the internet, and it has changed society forever.

Today, just 17 years later, the majority of human beings own a smartphone, and even more—around 85%—have access to a smartphone on a regular basis. This turning point for humanity has meant greater mobility for some, greater access to information for most, and constant connection to the world, no matter where you go.

Identifying turning points in human history is a bit tougher than identifying those in the lives of individuals. One really obvious example that goes through my brain (see what I did there?) is that of Phineas Gage, who had a railroad tamping iron rip through his head.

In an instant, Gage’s personality changed, and the direction his life would take was forever altered. You can read more of Gage’s incredible tale here:

While Gage’s own life turned on a dime, the real turning point has been the understanding of the human brain and how it functions. Neuroscience as a field owes an enormous debt to Gage.

Turning points in natural history can take a long time, but then again, the asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs landed near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, leaving behind a vast crater called Chicxulub, took virtually no time at all to create a massive fireball from the impact.

This explosion—more powerful than a million nukes going off all at once—created a nasty shockwave that caused immediate destruction for hundreds of miles. Tsunamis and earthquakes destroyed an awful lot of animals and their habitats in a very short period of time.

Within a few days, an uneven darkness descended on the Earth from all the debris in the atmosphere. This led to something akin to a nuclear winter and a prolonged ice age, and all life on the planet was affected. Even though the change in life took years to play out, this was a blink of the eye in geological terms.

The Earth changes slowly most of the time, but we humans have seen some rapid, planet-wide change a few times. Geological events like the Chicxulub impactor asteroid happen every hundred million years or so, but the human version of these events seems to be increasing in frequency and potency.

The smartphone flipped the world upside down in 2007, and we are still feeling the aftershocks. Is AI doing the same thing right now? What else might cause a turning point for the world?

Let’s dive even deeper into the phrase today: are there turning points in your own life you can identify, places where everything changed direction in an instant?