Albert Wenger

And how should we think about what we can do as humanity?

And then I kind of remember walking down Market Street in San Francisco, and it kind of clicked.

I mean, I've been sort of talking about it, but I had this real moment where it clicked.

And the thing that clicked was that one way to think about the large-scale history of humanity is there's a history of binding constraints, and that what technology does is it shifts what the binding constraint is.

So this can be very easily summarized for, you know, a long time we were foragers and the constraint was food.

You try to find enough food or it starved or had to migrate.

And then 10,000 years ago, roughly, we invented agriculture and the constraint shifted from food directly to land, to arable land.

You either had enough arable land so you could grow a lot of food or you didn't.

that was the whole new constraint and with that switch we made a huge amount of changes in how humanity lives and then a couple hundred years ago we had the enlightenment and we started to do real science and we invented steam and electricity and mining and chemistry and all that stuff and the constraint shifted again it shifted from arable land to capital how much physical capital can you put together like how many

buildings and factories and machines and cars and roads and so forth can you can you construct

And again, we wound up making tons of changes to how humanity lives.

And the insight that I had when I was walking down Market Street was like, digital technology is exactly like those two prior changes.

It shifts the binding constraint.

And the binding constraint is no longer physical capital, but it is attention.

What are humans paying attention to?

And once I had that key inside, then everything else kind of fell in place around it.

And that's really what the book is built around.

Yeah.

So, um,

Kolata's book is absolutely a must-read book.