So this episode is a column read, not a conversation.

But one reason I wanted to talk about this column is that it's a bit of a culmination

of things I've explored on the show through a bunch of conversations.

So the Marian Wolf conversation about the way different kinds of reading act on the mind,

I'll nu-port on the ways in which we have built digital work environments that distract

people more than it focuses them.

And then obviously a lot of the AI work we've been doing, where I think if you know,

if you've been listening, that I am pretty convinced, the technology is transformative

and can insinuate in all dimensions of our lives and could be very, very powerful.

And also what business models it ends up attached to, the actual way we design the environments

and ways human beings interact with it is really going to matter.

So it gives me a chance to revisit something that I've thought a lot about with the internet

itself, which is where this one begins.

So imagine I told you in 1970 that I was going to invent this wondrous tool and this new

tool make it possible for anyone with access and most of humanity would amazingly have access

to quickly communicate and collaborate with anyone else.

So it would store nearly the entire sum of human knowledge and thought up to that point.

And all of it, all of it would be searchable and sortable and portable.

Text could be instantly translated from one language to another.

News would be immediately available from all over the world.

And it would take no longer for scientists to download a journal paper from 15 years

ago, then to flip to an entry in the latest issue.

...