Vaclav Smil has produced a thoughtful analysis of our obsession with speed
Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian professor at the University of Manitoba, has long been one of the most disciplined thinkers on how technological change shapes our lives. In Speed: How it Explains the World, the scientist turns to a surprisingly under-examined theme.
Speed, he argues, is not only how fast we move from A to B, but also the rate at which things change: how quickly economies grow, vaccines are developed, or machines produce other machines. Recognition of the dual meaning – speed in the strict sense and in its broader meaning – gives the book range and bite.
For most of Earth’s history, Smil explains, everything happened with glacial slowness, beginning with biological change. In nature, limits to speed are everywhere. A cheetah’s velocity is traded against maneuverability; migrating birds travel within a narrow speed-band that optimizes energy. Nature rarely rewards maximum speed: it rewards balance.
That insight becomes a lens through which Smil rereads human history. For millennia, human life barely changed. Economies scarcely grew – and often shrank in the face of war, famine or disease. The real inflection came in the early 19th century in parts of Europe – and most dramatically in Britain. From the 1830s on, rising speeds in transport, communications, machining and calculation reshaped economic life and public health.
Yet Smil resists triumphalism. Many technologies, he notes, reached their practical peak speeds quickly after first deployment, then plateaued. It is a reminder that mythology often outruns physics – and machines, like organisms, have limits. Jet engines have become roughly 2% more efficient each year since the 1960s, yet commercial aircraft fly no faster. The economic sweet spot remains just below the speed of sound; push beyond it and costs rise faster than benefits. Similar logic applies on the ground. Cars reached their practical maximum cruising speeds as early as the 1930s; safety, congestion and urban design matter more than raw velocity.
Smil also reminds us that headline speeds obscure lived experience. Time in the air is only a fraction of a modern journey, swallowed by airport transfers and security queues. Achievable speed is not the same as real-world time saved.
For leaders accustomed to narratives of relentless acceleration, Smil’s analysis is a welcome corrective. He challenges what he calls “dubious grand generalizations” about ever-increasing speed and the inevitability of exponential progress. Information technology, and AI in particular, may be a striking contemporary outlier. Yet even here, Smil invites us to ask how long such exceptionalism can persist – and what happens when demographic slowdown, declining productivity growth, and organizational complexity create new forms of drag.
Smil is no Luddite. He dismisses romantic claims, such as the idea that walking is as “efficient” as motor travel, through careful empirical analysis. But neither does he worship speed for its own sake. Instead, he urges us to ask where additional speed truly benefits human welfare. Cutting turnaround times for medical tests may matter more than building hypersonic aircraft.
The book occasionally underplays the ethical and policy consequences of its own insights. A fuller exploration of how societies might mitigate the harms of excessive speed – not only in physical mobility, but in the rate of organizational and technological change – would have enriched an already thoughtful study. Still, Speed is characteristically Smil: meticulous, quietly contrarian, and deeply grounded in material reality.
For leaders navigating the rhetoric of disruption, it offers a bracing reminder that progress is not a race to go ever faster – but an exercise in knowing how, when and why to accelerate at all.
Piers Cain is a management consultant
