Breaking Smart

While we cannot predict precisely what workers of the future will be doing — what future wants and needs workers will be satisfying — we can predict some things about how they will be doing it. Work will take on an experimental, trial-and-error character, and will take place in an environment of rich feedback, self-correction, adaptation, ongoing i

As the hacker ethos spreads, we will witness what economist Edmund Phelps calls a mass flourishing2 — a state of the economy where work will be challenging and therefore fulfilling. Unchallenging, predictable work will become the preserve of machines.

Software possesses an extremely strange property: it is possible to create high-value software products with effectively zero capital outlay. As Mozilla engineer Sam Penrose put it, software programming is labor that creates capital. This characteristic make software radically different from engineering materials like steel, and much closer to arti

Chris Dixon captured this guerrilla pattern of the ongoing shift in political power with a succinct observation: what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.

In other words, true north in software is often the direction that combines ambiguity and evidence of fertility in the most alluring way: the direction of maximal interestingness.3