In this post ‘The Acceleration of Addictiveness‘, Paul Graham makes the case that the world becomes increasingly addictive, because of technological innovation.
“The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”
Paul Graham then goes on to remark that it took about 100 years for society to develop antibodies and new customs to reject cigarettes. Thus, “unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we’ll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us.”
And seeing how people get addicted by their smartphone nowadays it is certainly a concern. People that abstain or are able to limit their consumption are becoming fewer apart, and we also have more difficulty concentrating on a task without interruption.
This however, will become an essential skill in the Collaborative Age and we probably need to educate ourselves and our children how to have safe havens and time spans without connectivity and computers.
