(2017-09-09) Wenger Were Entering The Knowledge Age But Making It All About Money Is A Mistake

We’re Entering the Knowledge Age, But Making It All About Money Is A Mistake

*Albert Wenger, for his part, sounds awfully sanguine.

The reason: The spread of digital technology, he says, is going to “dramatically accelerate the knowledge loop” through which people learn new things, create solutions to major problems as a result, and then share their solutions with others who, in turn, will learn as well.*

Wenger suggests that the shift from the industrial age we currently inhabit to a knowledge age (information age) promises to be as profound as when civilization moved from foraging to farming, or from the agrarian age to the industrial age.

But getting from here to there won’t happen automatically. As Wenger sees it, people will need “economic freedom” (which is why he’s advocating a universal basic income), “informational freedom” (in which individuals—and not big tech companies—control the flow of content and computation), and “psychological freedom” (so that we don’t become “prisoners of parts of the brain that simply crave another little information hit, a little dopamine hit”).