Long ago I decided to form all my social and economic theory by watching reruns of Sliders and Dr. Who.
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.
