Were building a world where a universal basic income may be the only

rational, fair way for society to function and thats not a future we should
fear.
FIRST, A WORD on how we got here. All work can be divided into four types:
routine and nonroutine, cognitive and manual. Routine work is the same stuff
day in and day out, while nonroutine work varies. Within these two varieties,
is the work that requires mostly our brains (cognitive) and the work that
requires mostly our bodies (manual). Routine work started to stagnate in
1990, because some of that work can be best handled by machines.
Humans learn the difference as children, when chairs are identified for us by
name. If children point at a table and say chair, theyre corrected with
table. This is called reinforcement learning. The label chair gets
connected to every chair, such that certain neural pathways are weighted
and others arent. For chair to fire in our brains, what we perceive has to be
close enough to our previous chair encounters. Essentially, our lives are big
data filtered through our brains.
If youve ever spent time in a really poor country or with people who grew up
in awful poverty, youll notice how much they talk about foodtheir favorite
foods, what theyre going to eat this weekend, how they like this and dont
like that, and so on.
Much of these peoples lives and conversations revolves around food for the
simple reason that the scarcity of food makes it appear incredibly important.
The fact you prefer strawberries to oranges matters a lot when you can rarely
afford to have either. But in first-world cultures where food is never an issue,
discussions of food among most people are superficial and usually over within
a few seconds.
The scarcity in our world is no longer knowledge. Theres an abundance of
knowledge, just as theres an abundance of labor and an abundance of land.
No, the new scarcity in the internet age is attention. Since there is a surplus
of information, more information flowing through our society than any of us
could ever hope to process or understand, the new bottleneck on our
economy is attention. We now live in an attention-based economy.
In digital capitalismanother stage of imperialism?capital and corporation
underwrite free-ness, Bahri, the Emory professor, told me. Thats why
Facebook can claim to be always free.