I liked this article, the reflected summation of metrics, and the comments many of which countered with metrics. As someone with a lifetime in tech, metrics and trends with a later life shift to graduate studies Anthropology I’d like to submit the difficult to measure biggest “Black Swan” of all time: Sometime in the recent past (+/- 150,000 years) Homo Sapiens (and our siblings) gained what we awkwardly call “consciousness”. To assert that human nature or perceived human nature is stable and our filters and biases will remain constant seemingly is recurrently assuring in it’s predictability. That seems true until it isn’t. Maybe the sample window of human condition is calculated by the subject, humans, and is intrinsically narrowed to self concern and self centered preoccupation. There are limitless possibilities of real change. Four that comes to mind aren’t “Black Swans” because they have been thought of — 1) catastrophic or apocalyptic extinction or near extinction due to a meteor strike, pathogen, etc., 2) some type of cyborg shift between biological and AI, 3) the introduction of an alien species or a startling dimensional breakthrough around speed of light limitations, or, 4) some shift in consciousness (after all, it happened before). The point of this comment is there are linear metric trends and I’m not dismissing those. And, there is plenty of evidence of massive non-linear shifts so persistent that Nassim Taleb (math not anthropology) would propose they really aren’t surprises.