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 Scarcity
At 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 opportunities.
On the threat side, for example, we are not working nearly hard enough on how to recapture CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Or on monitoring asteroids that could strike earth, and coming up with ways of deflecting them. Or containing the outbreak of the next avian flu: we should have a lot more collective attention dedicated to early detection and coming up with vaccines and treatments.
Climate change, “death from above,” and pandemics are three examples of species level threats for humans. As I wrote earlier, we can only sustain the present number of humans on this planet due to our technological progress. Each one of these risk categories has the potential to fundamentally disrupt our ability to meet the basic needs of millions, potentially billions and possibly the entire human species. That’s why our collective attention is scarce in the precise sense of scarcity provided earlier.
On the opportunity side, far too little human attention is spent on environmental cleanup, free educational resources, and basic research (including the foundations of science), to name just a few examples. There are so many opportunities we could dedicate attention to that over time have the potential to dramatically improve quality of life here on Earth not just for humans but also for other species.
As in the individual case, much of our collective attention, instead of being applied to these threats and opportunities, is absorbed by having to earn a living, with our leisure time increasingly consumed by watching entertainment on the internet.
The result is that we are not investing nearly enough attention in generating more knowledge. And if we don’t have enough knowledge, we may not be able to solve some of the threats we are currently facing, such as climate change. The climate change threat is not a hypothetical concern, but has repeatedly led to the downfall of prior human civilizations, such as the Rapa Nui or the Mayans. Now, however, we are facing the climate change threat on a truly global scale. We should be using a few percent of all human attention to fight this but I suspect the actual number is two to three orders of magnitude smaller.
I am proposing this as a (possibly new) explanation for the Fermi Paradox, which famously asks why we have not yet detected any signs of intelligent life elsewhere in our rather large universe. We now even know that there are plenty of goldilocks planets available that could harbor life forms similar to those on Earth. Maybe what happens is that all civilizations get far enough to where they generate huge amounts of information, but then they get done in by attention scarcity. They collectively take their eye off the ball of progress and are not prepared when something really bad happens such as a global pandemic.
But why exactly is attention so poorly allocated? One key reason is that we are currently attempting to use the market mechanism to allocate attention. The next chapter explains why that cannot work.
