Martin Sustrik

But the obvious challenge is scale.

These work for dozens, maybe hundreds.

Aging countries need solutions for millions.

And then again, there are robot nurses.

It's all different kinds of problems, but all of them, in their essence, boil down to negative-sum games.

Speaking of those, one tends to think of it as of the pie shrinking.

And there's an obvious conclusion.

If you want your children to be as well-off as you are, you have to fight for someone else's slice.

In a shrinking world, one would expect ruthless predators running wild and civic order collapsing.

But what you really see is quite different.

The effect is gradual and subtle.

It does not feel like a violent collapse.

It feels more like the world silently coming apart at the seams.

There's no single big problem that you would point to.

It feels like if everything now just works a bit worse than it used to.

The bus route that ran hourly now runs only three times a day.

The elementary school merged with the one in the next town, so children now commute 40 minutes each way.

Processing paperwork at the municipal office takes longer now, because both clerks are past the retirement age.

The post office closes on Wednesdays and Fridays and the library opens only on Tuesdays.

The doctor at the neighborhood clinic stopped accepting new patients because he's 68 and can't find a replacement.