World After Capital

I want to provide one more reason for urgency in getting to the Knowledge Age. It is easy for us to think of ourselves as the center of the universe. In early cosmology we literally put the earth in the center with everything else revolving around it. We eventually figured out that we live on a smallish planet circling a star in a galaxy that's part of an incomprehensibly large universe.
More recently we have discovered that there are a great many planets more or less like ours scattered throughout the universe. That means some form of intelligent life may have arisen in other places. This possibility leads to many fascinating questions, one of which is known as the Fermi Paradox: if there is so much potential for intelligent life in the universe, why have we not yet picked up any signals?
There are different possible answers to this question. For instance, maybe civilizations get to a point similar to ours and then blow themselves to smithereens because they cannot make a crucial transition. Given the way we are handling the current transition that seems like a distinct possibility for Earth as well (see "A Dangerous Spiral" above). Or all intelligent civilizations encounter a problem, such as climate change, which they cannot solve and they disappear again entirely or become primitive. Given cosmic time and space scales, short lived broadcast civilizations might be especially difficult to detect (a broadcast civilization being one like ours that using electro magnetic waves for communication). I keep bringing up climate change because it is a clear and present danger but there are many more current and future species level challenges.

The world is rapidly being pulled apart between those who want to take us back into the past and those who are advancing technology, but are largely doing so still trapped in the Industrial Age. These two groups are engaged in a dangerous feedback loop.
As described all the way back in the introduction, technology itself simply increases the space of the possible. Pushing automation along is not automatically making everyone better off. Trapped in Industrial Age logic, automation is instead enriching a few, while putting pressure on large sections of society. Similarly, digital publishing doesn't automatically accelerate the Knowledge Loop. Instead, we are finding ourselves in a world of fake news and filter bubbles.

Pushing decisions to the lowest level at which they can be made is especially important at a time of great change. For instance, what is possible in education and learning is changing rapidly due to digital technology. That means we should allow experimentation at the local level instead of trying to have a national education policy. By running many experiments we can figure out much faster what works well, or even what works at all, rather than running a single large experiment.

As part of that exploration, we need to revisit our geographic units for decision making. How should we determine at which scale to address a particular problem? The key principle here is the one of “subsidiarity”: decisions should be made at the lowest possible level. Since we have one global atmosphere we need to learn to make some decisions globally, such as putting a limit on total greenhouse gases. But, staying with the same issue, the actual ways of achieving such a limit should be decided at lower levels, such as regions or countries.

The second cognitive limit is the human tendency to believe in stories rather than data—again, a well documented and understood bias. After a study came out suggesting that smaller schools tended to produce better student performance than larger schools, educators set about creating a lot of smaller schools. A subsequent study found that a lot of smaller schools were also doing exceptionally poorly. It turns out that this finding in part amounted to a statistical effect: The more students a school has, the more likely that school is to approximate the overall distribution of students. A small school is much more likely to have students who perform predominantly well or poorly. [Use another examples here from Daniel Kahnemann?]

human tendency to believe in stories rather than data

We need to free ourselves from an instrumental view of knowledge and embrace learning for its own sake as part of the Knowledge Loop.

Young kids ask upwards of three hundred questions a day. [121] Humans are naturally curious, and it's precisely this curiosity that has driven so much of our progress. At the same time, our curiosity in some ways didn't match well with the industrial system. If you want to employ people in a factory job that has them performing the same action all day every day, then curiosity doesn't help; on the contrary, it hurts. The same goes for many service jobs today, such as say operating a cash register or delivering packages on time.

Can we fundamentally change our mindsets and emotional attachments? Can we overcome the fears and anxieties that might prevent us from gaining, creating, and sharing knowledge? Can we put down our phones when they are designed to keep drawing us in with notifications? It seems a monumental task, but humankind is uniquely adaptable. We have experienced social, economic, and technological transitions of a similar magnitude. At one time it was inconceivable that humans could part with the close-knit relationships and natural rhythms of rural life to live in vast, impersonal cities and work in mechanized factories. [Find some great quotes from that time] Yet we did make the leap, overcoming our fears and embracing a range of modern practices, beliefs, and assumptions.
We now understand scientifically why humans can adapt so well. As neuroscientists have discovered, our brains remain quite plastic even as we age, and what we think and how we think can be changed. In fact, we ourselves can change it quite deliberately—not just with pharmaceuticals, but using both ancient techniques such as meditation and breathing, and modern ones such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy [117].

At present, over 3.5 Billion people are connected to the Internet, and we are connecting over 200 Million more every year [88]. This tremendous growth has become possible because the cost of access has fallen so dramatically.