At Rise of AI 2019 in Berlin, Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, argues that the central question for the age of AI is not information but attention: what humans choose to pay attention to. He opens with CO2 levels reaching 415 parts per million and argues society fails to attend to climate change because market prices do not exist for the most important problems, such as an individual's purpose in life, planetary defense against asteroids, or preventing climate change, while advertising-driven attention has a clear price and is therefore over-allocated. He traces how the scarce resource shifted historically from food (foraging) to land (agriculture) to capital (industrial age), arguing markets allocate capital well but fail at allocating attention. His core proposal is that AI should be used to free human attention from what he calls the job loop, the cycle of selling labor to buy goods, rather than to capture more attention for advertising. He closes with three proposals: universal basic income for economic freedom, informational freedom through open APIs to platforms, and individual mindfulness practice, and points to his ongoing open book project, World After Capital.
Key takeaways
- Wenger argues the defining scarcity of the current era is human attention, not information, which is abundant.
- Markets allocate attention poorly because the most important questions, like personal purpose or planetary defense, have no price or demand curve.
- Advertising gives attention a resale price, so companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon are incentivized to capture as much of it as possible.
- AI should be used to free human attention from the 'job loop' of selling labor to buy goods, not to capture more attention for advertisers.
- He proposes universal basic income, open programmatic access to platforms, and personal mindfulness practice as complementary paths to reclaiming attention.
Detailed notes
Attention, not information, as the defining scarcity
Wenger opens with a chart showing CO2 in the atmosphere had reached 415 parts per million as of a recent May 2nd reading, and observes that despite knowing the world is warming, people do not act on it, illustrated by a viral clip of an ape scrolling a phone which he calls both funny and disconcerting because it mirrors human behavior on Instagram. He references the Matrix films, arguing the movies get it backwards: humans are not enslaved by machines in a war, they are putting themselves into the pods voluntarily by spending hours on Fortnite or Instagram, and the environmental destruction in the films is better read as a consequence of neglect rather than war.
From food to land to capital: a history of scarcity
He traces roughly 250,000 years of Homo sapiens history: for most of it, food was the scarce resource for foraging tribes, driving migration across the globe. About 10,000 years ago agriculture, through irrigation, seed selection, domestication, writing and currency, shifted scarcity to arable land, producing hierarchical societies and warfare over territory. A few hundred years ago, starting with the Enlightenment, steam and electrical power and chemistry shifted scarcity to physical capital (factories, buildings, railroads); societies tried allocating capital by state edict versus by markets, and markets won decisively. Wenger argues today is not really an information age, since machines generate petabytes of logs every second, but a knowledge age, in which the truly scarce resource is human attention.
Why markets fail to allocate attention
Wenger argues that applying the market/price mechanism, which worked well for physical capital, to attention is a mistake, because the most important things people could attend to have no price, supply or demand curve. Examples: figuring out one's personal purpose in life (which he links to midlife and early-life crises from lack of attention to the question); planetary defense against large asteroid strikes, a rare but catastrophic long-tail risk, for which roughly as few people work full-time on detection as work at one large McDonald's; and climate change, where a carbon tax helps but does not match the scale of the problem. Meanwhile, attention does have a resale price through advertising (he cites Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon stock prices tracking how much attention those companies capture), so attention gets over-allocated to being captured by platforms rather than to underpriced existential problems.
Using AI to break the job loop
Wenger describes the 'job loop': selling labor for income, using that income to buy goods made by other people also selling their labor, a cycle he says traps most human attention, including that of the audience after the talk. He argues AI's purpose should be freeing attention from this loop, not capturing more of it for advertising. He cites an Our World in Data chart by Max Roser showing agricultural labor share collapsing from most of the workforce in 1300 to under 5% in many industrialized countries today, but rejects the common reading that this simply proves new jobs always replace old ones; he reads it instead as evidence that attention can be freed from an activity. He argues that if AI is used correctly, a similar future chart, perhaps by the year 2100, should show attention leaving the job loop entirely toward non-economic activity such as fighting climate change, curing disease, or making music, rather than shifting to a new set of jobs.
Three proposals: UBI, informational freedom, and mindfulness
Wenger closes with three proposals from his ongoing book project. First, universal basic income, which he calls 'economic freedom' in the book, giving everyone enough money to freely allocate their time; he notes it is not a new idea, citing Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King as historical supporters, and 2019 US presidential candidate Andrew Yang as well as European parties currently campaigning on it. Second, 'informational freedom': he argues that despite everyone carrying a supercomputer in their pocket, it does not truly serve its owner because companies like Facebook do not expose full programmatic APIs, preventing people from building agents that act on their behalf; he calls for full programmatic access to such platforms. Third, an individual-level proposal: since human brains did not evolve for infinite scrolling of content like cat pictures, everyone needs to develop a personal mindfulness practice to reclaim their own attention, independent of collective policy change. He points listeners to his creative-commons-licensed, iteratively written book, World After Capital, available on GitHub.
Quotes
We're putting ourselves in the pods right now as we speak.
Albert Wenger
Let's stop working on using AI to hog attention.
Albert Wenger
Questions answered in this talk
Why does Albert Wenger say attention, not information, is the key scarcity of our time?
According to Albert Wenger at Rise of AI 2019, machines already generate more information than anyone can use, so the real bottleneck is what humans choose to pay attention to, and the most important problems, like climate change or personal purpose, have no market price to guide that attention.
How does Albert Wenger think AI should be used, according to his Rise of AI 2019 talk?
According to Albert Wenger at Rise of AI 2019, AI should be used to free people from the 'job loop' of selling labor to buy goods, rather than to capture more human attention for advertising, so that freed attention can go toward problems like climate change, disease and creative work.
What three proposals does Albert Wenger make for a post-scarcity attention economy?
According to Albert Wenger at Rise of AI 2019, he proposes universal basic income for economic freedom, full programmatic access to platforms like Facebook for informational freedom, and a personal mindfulness practice so individuals can reclaim their own attention.