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The number of people living on Earth today is significantly greater than it was 15,000 years ago; it must be several times greater than it was back then. Every person alive today has, both theoretically and practically, significantly more opportunities to meet another person than in the sparsely populated world of that time. That is why the number of interactions between people is many times greater. If there are more people, and they encounter one another more often, more things happen. That’s a very brief overview of the theory of sets and combinatorics.

Let’s look at the bright side. If there are more people, there’s likely to be more conversation, and there are also more people with ideas. More things are conceived—for example, grain cultivation, the round wheel, steel production, or electronic communication via so-called digital devices and machines. Very few inventions were made by a single person; inventors always built upon the knowledge of those who came before them and those living alongside them.

Nowadays, the exchange—or simply the dissemination—of information about events of all kinds, whether important or less so, usually takes place globally with little or no delay. As long as a person has access to global communication today, they can share information on a global scale.

Is the increase in events merely apparent or real? The massive occurrence of political and social events should not be equated with natural disasters such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have their origins outside of human influence—at least for the most part in our present time. Mathematically speaking, more is indeed happening in the life of humanity on this planet than it did millennia ago. And events are reported worldwide.

The following, however, is less positive. A mistake—such as a thoughtless remark or a misunderstanding—can snowball. Mistakes can escalate. And they can have serious consequences. This kind of situation existed even before the advent of digital technology. But with digital technology, it happens much faster.

Artificial intelligence is evolving. Today, the term has a different meaning than it did decades ago, when a database system was already considered the—albeit temporary—pinnacle of computational development. Artificial intelligence, as we understand it today, belongs to the category of stochastic systems. There are stochastic and deterministic systems. A deterministic system calculates all possible outcomes; it calculates all the way to the end. In the case of a chess game, for example, all possible moves by the players could be calculated in advance. That takes a long time. But hardware and software are constantly improving. Calculating in advance the movement of all atoms in a given object over a specific period of time would likely take even longer. Or predicting the development of human social systems—since this would involve a great many unknown variables—such a calculation is unlikely to be successfully realized at this time or in the foreseeable future.

Since some things simply take that long, we opt for the alternative: stochastics. Stochastics doesn’t calculate all possibilities. It’s more of a hunch; it works with chance—you could say it guesses at outcomes. It’s faster when some possibilities are left out. But stochastic methods make mistakes, much like the human brain. The human brain and computationally stochastic systems are, in principle, not error-free. Both deliver good to excellent results over long periods. But eventually, they make mistakes. No matter how serious a technical error may be, you can’t blame the technology.

This, too, might be worth considering. Humans are social beings. To put it somewhat bluntly, humans are herd animals; they follow others. At the same time, a trend toward strong individualization has been evident in many countries for some time. Both of these factors lead to the phenomenon of the social bubble. People interact with others who are similar to them in some ways, while at the same time distancing themselves from those who are somewhat different. They prefer to see and hear what they already like to see and hear; they don’t want to acknowledge anything that runs counter to their inner values. Hasn’t it always been this way?

We communicate as much as technology allows. But do we really understand each other any better?

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