Editor’s note: Besides following tech developments, our author is a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. This piece is called “Adapt and Collaborate.”
Human beings possess two powerful abilities that separate them from other species: adaptation and collaboration. Our smartphones provide a contemporary illustration of how we use these abilities, but the fact is that human history shows we have been collaborating for millennia longer than we have had smartphones.
From an evolutionary perspective, human collaboration dates back even earlier than the appearance of Homo sapiens 200,000-300,000 years ago. Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that systematic cooperation emerged at least 300,000-400,000 years ago with Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species of archaic human that existed during the Middle Pleistocene. Collaboration preceded Neanderthal, Denisovans and Homo erectus.
With today’s communication technology, people on the planet can collaborate with anyone else almost instantaneously and incrementally for free. Action plans and relevant information can be shared as never before. In just over 15 years, smartphones have become central to daily life for billions of people globally. Once again, human beings have shown that we are able to adapt far more readily than any other living organism.
It took a global pandemic to bring into widespread use the single most dominant collaboration tool in the world: Video Conferencing Software. Some of us have been using this software category for the last twenty years. However, we were not using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet which enabled teams of lay people to use real-time video communication to hold virtual meetings and discussions. None of these very accessible platforms existed before 2013! As of April 2020, more than 36 percent of employees in the United States were using Zoom when working remotely, followed by Microsoft Teams at 19 percent. Talk about adaptation!
And all of this is a moving target. ChatGPT tells us that, as of 2024, approximately 4.48 billion people worldwide, representing about 56.8 percent of the global population, use email. And in the United States, over 92 percent of individuals aged 15 and above use email as a form of online communication. (This despite the fact that young people regard email as tech for old folks.)
Just when international phone calls became free and unlimited, younger generations, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, now prefer texting over phone calls. In the U.S., 75 percent of Millennials and Gen Z prefer texting to calling. Overall, 68 percent of today’s consumers text more than they talk on smartphones. The broader global trend shows that texting has become the dominant form of communication, surpassing traditional phone calls. Also, the prevalence of video calls, where participants have their cameras turned on, has been steadily increasing. In 2022, 35 percent of all phone calls involved video.
Remember when office collaboration meant gathering around the water cooler or passing manila folders through interoffice mail? Times have changed! Our virtual workplace is buzzing with a veritable symphony of digital tools and, not surprising, we’re getting rather good at using them. We’ve traded in our trusty filing cabinets for cloud storage services, and those yellow sticky notes have given way to sophisticated project management tools like Trello and Asana. The numbers tell quite a story: 79 percent of us were using these collaboration tools by 2021 (up 44 percent from our pre-pandemic days), proving you can teach even seasoned professionals new tricks. Email still holds court for formal communications, but we’re now just as likely to be shooting quick messages through Slack or crafting documents together in real-time on Google Workspace—rather like having a virtual conference room where everyone can contribute without fighting over the last cup of coffee. The best part? Companies that embrace this new way of working have seen employee turnover drop by half. You can build quite a strong community without sharing the same zip code.
Human language development occurred from 50,000 to 150,000 years ago. This dramatically enhanced our collaborative abilities, allowing for complex coordination and knowledge sharing. This communication capacity, combined with our cognitive abilities and social nature, made humans uniquely successful at working together to solve problems and build increasingly complex societies, but it took 100,000 years! We have made so many changes in the last five years that it is not surprising that large groups of people are feeling left behind.
While most of this collaboration focuses on short-term phenomena and current events, we are now at the point where planetary collaboration is required. Global warming, nuclear contamination, and the spread of misinformation by social media echo chambers and AI raise the chances that we human beings will actually do ourselves in. The good news is that, if and when we finally decide that we want to manage these human-created threats, we have a truly unbelievable ability to adapt and collaborate.
We now have the power to change the entire planet and the human race in twenty years…if we agree that we want to. Evidently, we are not there yet. But when we do, the rapidity of recent adaptation shows that it will not take hundreds of thousands or thousands or even hundreds of years. But it will not take just a few years either, more like tens of years, assuming we do not accidentally wipe ourselves out first. There is one colossal reason I think we will not: it is not good for businesses to wipe ourselves out, and business seems to be becoming the dominant force of convergence on the planet. Yes, it will be messy, but we will continue to adapt and collaborate because that is what we have been doing for over 300,000 years.
