Continuations

I let meetings take over my life. For reasons that I might get into some other time I said yes to way too many meetings. My schedule became ever more packed, often running back-to-back for entire days. It became harder and harder to find time to read, think, and write. I also had virtually no time to deal with emergencies when those came up. My attention was no longer mine to direct. It had been hijacked by meetings. Having had a break from meetings on a six week voyage across the Atlantic, I...

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...

Here is a talk which I gave at the Rise of AI conference in Berlin earlier this year on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and the allocation of attention. It explicitly links what is happening online to the climate crisis.

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital starts to explain why capitalism cannot solve the problem of allocating attention which is scarce at the individual and collective levels.Limits Of CapitalismCapitalism has been extraordinarily successful. So much so that even communist countries like China, that had long sought a different path, have embraced it. But capitalism cannot solve the scarcity of attention without significant changes in regulation and self-regulation. That’s due to thr...

NOTE: I am resuming publishing excerpts from my draft book World After Capital. Today’s section continues the discussion of why attention is scarce. Since it has been five weeks, I recommend first rereading the prior section which introduces attention scarcity.Collective Attention ScarcityAt the same time our collective attention is also scarce. How so? Humanity as a whole is not devoting nearly enough attention towards moving knowledge forward with regard to a variety of threats and opportun...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about attention. It argues why attention is scarce in the sense of scarcity introduced earlier in the book. This section sets up the demands on attention and then talks about scarcity of attention for the individual (next time will look at scarcity of attention for society as a whole).AttentionThere is a limited amount of human attention in the world. We have 24 hours in the day and we need to spend some of that time eating and sleeping. For m...

NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital. Today’s section provides a technological definition of scarcity (instead of an economic one) and provides a brief history of how scarcity has shifted over time from food to land to capital and is now shifting to attention. Scarcity In this book I will be arguing that capital is no longer scarce but that attention now is. Furthermore this constitutes the third major shift in scarcity in the history of humanity....

Today marks my 8-year anniversary of blogging. I have learned so much from it and want to thank everyone who has engaged in the comments over the years. I am particularly grateful for comments that are critical and for ones that provide links to additional material. The reason is that those help move my thinking forward. They are part of the critical process through which knowledge improves over time (of course the occasional compliment or thanks are also much appreciated). We should not take...

Here is my talk from the wonderful GEL conference earlier this year covering some of the ideas from my draft book World After Capital