David Pennington

Again, the majority of Australians are sceptical about the productivity mantra. When they hear that word they see cost-cutting rather than shared benefit.

Here’s the TLDR:in early 19th-century northern England, textile workers buck up against a new technology that automates their work and replaces well-paid skilled jobs with machines. When factory owners reject demands that the benefits of the new technology be shared, they gravitate around the avatar of young “Ned Ludd” and begin breaking the new ma... See more

In the 1960s, psychologist Jerome Singer, the grandfather of daydreaming studies, identified three kinds of mind-­wandering: the productive, creative “positive constructive daydreaming,” obsessive “guilty–­dysphoric daydreaming,” and “poor attentional control.” Singer believed daydreaming was a positive adaptive behavior—­a bold departure from the ... See more

“The world of real things is very inefficient.” Harnessing the network effects of big data, he foresees a future where we can more efficiently do many things: “We will definitely see dynamically priced queues for confession-­taking priests and therapists,” he said.

Today you rarely see the word “idle” except when used as a pejorative; to be idle is to be wasteful, and several of the most popular Internet startup companies have targeted underutilized resources such as idle cars (Turo, ZipCar), household equipment (SnapGoods), or empty bedrooms (Airbnb), allowing people to make use of them by renting them out w... See more

What happens when we replace boredom with constant distraction and stimulation? Warnings about the harmful effects of too much stimulation are nothing new. “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli,” Sigmund Freud observed. But given the range and speed of stimuli at our di... See more

Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and the end o... See more

the belief that you can do anything, including things you are blatantly not qualified for or straight up lying about— should be pathologized. It has many names (Dunning-Krueger, illusory superiority), but I suggest we call it blowhard syndrome as a neat parallel.

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting c... See more