Since we’re talking about “generating time,” I thought it wouldn’t hurt to take a little road trip into Speculation Land, where technological utopians like myself wax poetic about how bits of silicon may one day save us from ourselves.

Here’s a bit of personal history. I am actually an Electrical Engineer. Weird, right? I studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Florida for quite sometime before grabbing my Masters, sticking it in a closet somewhere and buying a one way ticket to the Internet.

Either way, what always fascinated me about intelligent machines wasn’t necessarily the idea of being able to hold a conversation with my robot butler, but the idea that intelligent software could act as a means for us to copy ourselves in a way that might actually allow us to create more time.

Imagine a world where everyone ran a piece of space-software on their hyper-computers that understood the types of things that we were interested in, the way we did did research and the methods we used to parse information once we found it. The only difference between the software agent and you would be that the software could act millions of times faster, slicing and dicing data down into summaries that were orders of magnitude more relevant than anything you could find on your own. It almost wouldn’t need anywhere near as much coffee.

Not only is this kind of software possible in the (relatively) near-term, but it may also be one of the only ways we have of seriously increasing the supply of Attention in our economy.

The term “barriers to entry” as it relates to the Internet is all mucked up. We are convinced that the primary barrier to entering a market is money. Yes, that’s true, in the world that existed before we started handing out bandwidth and teaching everyone HTML, money was a pretty big thing even for Internet folks.

Now we have publishing, hosting and distribution costs that are negligible. Does that mean that barriers to entry don’t exist? Not by a long shot. Now, the currency isn’t cash it’s Attention.

We need to look really closely at Attention if we are going to understand where this train is taking business an entrepreneurship in the near term. The amount of Attention we have available to us is fixed. There is only 24 hours in a day, and those precious few hours that we aren’t sleeping, working or spending time with our loved ones are being increasingly taxed by every new post, video and startup to enter the market.

That end result is that the barriers to enter the web have been steadily increasing for years, and will continue to increase until we either find a way to create more time or to use the time we have more efficiently.

If you want to get people to pay attention to something, the most important skill you can have is a gift for grasping narratives.

People learn and act through analogy, this fact is an essential marketing tool when you’re trying to cut through the background noise.