The Evolution of Communication and the Limits of Human Potential

From fire signals to satellites, humanity has continually expanded its ability to send and receive information. But as communication technologies accelerate far beyond our biological limits, we now face an overwhelming flood of data. What have we gained—and what might we be losing?

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　“December has finally arrived.”

The development of communication tools has made it possible to learn about events at the far ends of the world in an instant.

Of course, such information still depends on people who relay it. Yet today, even without human observers, satellites detect earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, and other natural phenomena for us.

Human beings have evolved around the question of how to transmit information.

Fire allowed us to signal our location.
Faster travel enabled us to deliver goods more quickly and expand our range of activity.
The Industrial Revolution—and the rapid advances that followed Edison—accelerated this progress even further. With the rise of the internet, it felt as if this expansion might finally pause for breath. But one wonders where it will head next.

And what, exactly, have we gained through the development of modern communication devices?

Natural disasters, wars and conflicts, and countless incidents and accidents from around the globe now reach us like waves rolling in.
Stories that once traveled slowly, carried by a wandering visitor from a distant land, now appear before us almost in real time.

They come not one by one, but all at once—less like discrete “events” and more like a continuous “disaster.”

In modern society, each of us must somehow sort and select this disaster-scale flow of information in real time.

But is such a task truly possible?

It is hard to believe that human information-processing capacity has improved dramatically over such a short span of history.
If anything, it seems we are merely tolerating the overflow.

Seen this way, the information overload brought about by communication technology must be placing considerable stress on us, and it would be no surprise if many people could no longer keep up. Yet somehow society continues to function.

It is a curious thing.

Is this human potential—our latent capacity to adapt? Perhaps so.
But whatever explanations we offer, the truth is that humanity itself does not know where this trajectory will ultimately lead.