“Regardless of which path we choose, the future of computing will be hyper-personalized,” they write. “The question is whether that personalization will be in service of keeping us passively glued to screens—wading around in the shallows, stripped of agency—or whether it will enable us to direct more attention to what matters.”

Consider the apple: an apple tree wraps its reproductive code (the seed) in an animal-tempting package (the fruit). The seed rides along for free, gets distributed, and only needs to get to work once it’s already in fertile ground, later. Nature asks no one to value the seed.