Austin Calvert

The artist creates markets. What makes great art is a question too few people in business ask. Much of business operates through commercial incentives and commoditized thinking, both of which are often downstream of what artists first imagine. Business has also become far too obsessed with next quarter’s results. The artist works on a different horizon, often without knowing whether a market for their work will ever exist. Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid and one of Steve Jobs’ heroes, understood something essential about this: “The important and nearly impossible projects such as we set for our goal require prolonged periods of intensive concentration.” The ability to sustain attention gives each individual a chance to create something that previously seemed impossible. Yet the sheer number of decisions our current technology forces upon us makes this anything but an artist’s paradise. We have confused convenience with progress. Technologists offer us the tooling, but the values guiding its design have gone terribly awry. If we’re approaching the renaissance Altman envisions, we ought to ask what kind of human activity our technology is making possible. So many of our screens demand our attention simply to operate them. We spend our days clicking through business applications, reconstructing context, managing workflows, and performing what increasingly feels like cosplay of productive work. All this activity, with remarkably little new creation to show for it. Our values have become splintered, in part because the algorithms organizing our attention reward fragmentation. We’ve optimized for engagement, retention, and the repeated return to the interface. Perhaps the next great innovation is the recovery and re-founding of the values that should guide our technology in the first place. And I have a feeling those values begin with protecting human attention. Because attention is what makes sustained intention, independent judgment, and ultimately creation possible. Perhaps, in the end, we should measure technology by the meaningful decisions it enables per unit of human attention, rather than the amount of attention it retains. Decision quality per unit of attention. Maybe that’s a better metric than retention.

Not a single software company has developed a specific direction for what productivity could mean with infinite intelligence. Everyone wants to ship another deck, but in effect, the work is working us. The actual work will be found in developing something new, not having the work work us. In essence, the enablement of bureaucrats should be the goal. AI will lead them there, that is a certainty. Mathematical functions acting upon their data will deliver a trajectory to each user and suggest who they could and should coordinate with within a large institution. We have to think about what we could be doing, not just managing and looking backwards.