I sometimes pick up my phone because there is something I want to know. A name I cannot remember, a place I have heard mentioned, or a question that came up while making coffee.
The answer is rarely difficult to find.
What is difficult is stopping once I have the answer.
Within a few minutes, the original question has opened into several others. There are tabs waiting to be read, links that might be useful later and something entirely unrelated that I now feel I need to understand.
None of it is necessarily a waste of time. Much of it may be genuinely interesting.
That is itself, the biggest part of the problem.
In 1971, the economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon wrote about what happens when information becomes abundant. His point was that abundance does not remove scarcity. It moves it somewhere else.
He used the example of rabbits and lettuce. A world with more rabbits becomes, relatively speaking, a world with less lettuce. The rabbits may be multiplying, but the food they consume is not.
Information works in much the same way.
As information becomes more abundant, the thing it consumes becomes scarce.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Herbert Simon
For most of human history, useful information was genuinely difficult to obtain. Books were expensive. Libraries were limited. Expertise could be far away. Finding an answer might take days of research, rather than seconds.
The internet changed that. Smartphones then placed much of the world’s information permanently within reach.
Generative AI represents another, arguably even bigger shift. We are no longer only gaining easier access to information that already exists. We can produce new explanations, articles, images, summaries and opinions almost instantly.
The supply can continue expanding, yet the number of hours in a person’s day cannot.
This creates a strange reversal. We once built tools to help us find information. Now we increasingly need tools to help us ignore it.
Search engines answered the problem of scarcity. Algorithms attempted to deal with abundance by choosing what we should see next. But the organisations doing the choosing often benefit when we keep looking, creating an “attention economy”.
The tool helping us navigate abundance may also have an incentive to make leaving difficult.
This does not mean information is bad, or that knowing less is somehow more virtuous. I am grateful that I can answer a question in seconds, learn from people I will never meet and access ideas that might once have remained unavailable to me.
But every piece of information carries a price, even when no money changes hands.
A free article costs the time required to read it. A video costs ten minutes. A podcast costs an hour (or often more now). A notification may cost only a few seconds, along with whatever thought it interrupted.
Perhaps this is why screen time figures can feel both useful, yet also slightly incomplete. They tell me how long I looked, but not what the looking gave me.
A better question might be: What did I buy with my attention today?
Sometimes the answer would be worthwhile. A conversation with someone I care about. An idea that stayed with me. Something practical that made life easier.
At other times, I suspect I exchanged it for the vague feeling of having consumed a lot while retaining very little.
AI deepens this problem by making information much faster to produce than it is to absorb. But it might also help in the opposite direction, not by creating more for us to consume, but by filtering, condensing and helping us decide what we can safely ignore.
Perhaps abundance requires a different kind of literacy.
The important skill was once learning how to access information. Then it became learning how to search it. The next may be learning how to refuse it.
There will always be another article to read, another video to watch, another podcast to hear and another answer waiting to be generated.
The information will not run out.
Our days will.
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