The First 99% Was the Stone Age
It is often said that 99% of human history was spent in the Stone Age. This is not a metaphor—it is, for the most part, true.
Even if we define humanity strictly as Homo sapiens, around 290,000 of our 300,000-year history was spent in the Paleolithic era, making up about 97% of our existence. If we trace our lineage further back to early hominins, the ratio increases to between 99.6% and 99.9%.
In other words, agriculture, cities, nations, and even AI—all emerged within the final sliver, less than 1% of our history.
Revolutions Are Accelerating
The Agricultural Revolution began roughly 10,000 years ago. When humanity chose to settle and discovered the concept of “production,” society began to transform. After 4 million years of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, that paradigm ended in just a few generations.
Since then, humanity has repeatedly undergone transformative leaps—what we now call “revolutions.”
From agriculture to the Industrial Revolution took about 10,000 years.
From there to the Information Revolution: roughly 200 years.
And from that to the AI Revolution: just 30 years.
The intervals between revolutions have been shrinking exponentially.
As revolutions become more frequent, they are no longer “exceptions” but the new “norm.” What once defined an entire era for millennia now gets overturned within decades.
Generative AI became a starting point for the next upheaval the moment it arrived. As it penetrates society, it actively influences the trajectories of AGI, robotics, brain-machine interfaces, and other concurrent revolutions.
We now live in a time when we can no longer afford the luxury of recognizing that a revolution even happened.
Revolutions Always Destroy What’s Most Primitive
The Agricultural Revolution dismantled humanity’s coexistence with nature.
The Industrial Revolution redefined labor and the meaning of time.
The Information Revolution shattered physical limitations.
And now, the AI Revolution threatens to redefine what it means to be human.
Information flow, the reassembly of knowledge, behavioral optimization, externalized consciousness—all of these have unfolded within the final 1% of human history.
The idea that revolutions are accelerating is itself an indication of a singularity. Whether or not Kurzweil’s prediction of 2045 comes true, we are already living in something resembling a singularity.
We are no longer in an age between revolutions—we are living within an unbroken state of revolution itself.
The Sense of Living in the Final 1%
If 99% of human history was the Stone Age, then we are living in that final 1%—right now.
Farming, nations, economies, energy, networks, and AI—all these revolutionary changes occurred in less than 1% of our past. And it is likely that in the next 0.1%, everything will be rewritten again.
That next revolution may not even be expressible in human language.