How much has the person whose attention you are competing for changed over the past 30 years?

That's a multilayered question. I assume you mean the person as a media consumer.

Exactly.

People probably haven't changed all that much over millions of years. Evolution is relatively slow, but the evolution of the media — or this imposed layer — has been extremely rapid. People have gone from being listeners to participants in less than 30 years. In fact, you could say that shift has taken place over just the past 15 years.

I think people, as relatively slow-evolving organisms, are deeply confused. They don't quite know how to respond to all the messages bombarding them at once. So from my perspective as someone working in advertising or communicating messages, it's quite difficult to navigate how different segments respond. Some are still very slow, while others are very fast and you constantly have to make sense of everything in between.

So it isn't people who have changed, but the environment around them.

Yes, the environment, which inevitably affects people's cognitive processes — whether they become anxious or turn inward, for example. You constantly have to take that into account depending on the intensity of the message or what you're trying to say.

Is it harder to capture people's attention now than it was in the 1990s?

Generally speaking, yes. But if you manage to strike the right chord with a particular segment or hit a social nerve, some messages can, surprisingly, become absolutely huge very quickly. But predicting that in advance is extremely difficult.

The way we watch and read has changed. Do you personally read and watch things differently than you did 30 years ago?

I certainly do. For one thing, when it comes to books, I only read very high-quality material because there's no point in reading everything. I listen to quite a lot of things, often at increased playback speeds and I think many people listen to podcasts and consume things that matter to them at the moment primarily as audio or watch them on YouTube or some other audiovisual platform. The speed at which we absorb information is undoubtedly greater, but on the other hand, we retain less of it. A lot depends on the information you're consuming and what you're doing with it.

Not everything about these changes is positive, but neither is everything negative. One indisputably positive development, however, is that just a few decades ago, a relatively small group of people — editors, publishers, television producers and record producers — decided whose work reached the public. Today, a completely unknown 18-year-old can make something on their phone and millions of people can see it the next day. Isn't that an enormous cultural liberation?

The question is what we consider culture. Back then, yes, there were certain people who curated culture and their filters allowed through work of a certain quality, which guaranteed that society received relatively high-quality material. At times, it was also ideologically controlled, but it was more or less high quality because there was an agreed-upon standard of quality.

Today, that kind of curation is virtually nonexistent. Things are curated, so to speak, by general opinion or mass attitudes and some things grow enormously popular. Without any kind of control, cultural bubbles and movements emerge over which there is absolutely no control. Whether that's good or bad is another question. They become subcultures of a sort and their viability depends on whether they can regulate themselves or whether they burst like bubbles.

By liberation, I also meant that when a small group of people decides who is talented and whose work has value, how many people might have remained under the radar? In other words, how much talent went undiscovered?

A great many talented people certainly went undiscovered if they flew under the radar. If we go back 30 or 40 years, there were underground scenes where you had these undiscovered talents, some of whom later turned out to be geniuses while others simply faded away.

Today, however, everyone — talented and not so talented — climbs onto the social media stage and tries to capture people's attention. That means an individual's information environment contains so much noise, so many different things that it becomes very difficult to figure out where to direct their attention. It's hard to say which is better: a curated world or the spontaneously emerging, bubbling world we have today.

I think that, given the sheer volume of information, a certain amount of curation is actually a good thing.

Did those professional gatekeepers, if we can call them that, primarily protect quality back then or were they protecting their own positions?

Both. Society is generally a hierarchical system and protecting certain positions is, in a sense, OK as long as it doesn't threaten society. There's inevitably a certain conservatism involved. But if protecting a position also protects quality, then it's justified. If it simply becomes about egos or imposing an inappropriate ideology, then of course that's a problem. Since I'm someone who places a very high value on quality, I think quality should be protected and preserved.

If everyone can speak, write, film and express their opinions, then as consumers we have to distinguish what matters from what doesn't and knowledge from mere confident opinion. Have people today learned to be their own editors?

The honest answer is no. Intelligent, perceptive people who may be accustomed to a slightly slower pace tend to lose their bearings amid the ever-increasing, exponential pace of things.

There are plenty of examples from recent history. When shifts have occurred in politics and public attitudes, intelligent people have at some point begun expressing themselves in relatively radical terms or even lashing out. They've clearly lost their bearings and can no longer find their way. The obvious reason is that there is too much one-sided information and today our patterns of thought and our worldview are curated to a great extent by social media. It assumes that we like certain topics and keeps offering us more topics based on what its calculations say about us. That affects us quite significantly. We often discover that we've drifted off somewhere. If we discover it at all ... Some people live so deeply inside a bubble that they no longer notice anything or their mental state changes as a result.

If an algorithm decides what I see, watch and listen to, is the algorithm also what creates authority today?

An algorithm is certainly an amplifier. Whether it creates authority, I don't know. I don't think it's intellectually sophisticated enough yet to create it independently, but it certainly amplifies it.

In the past, authorities were people who had something truly substantive and fundamental to say. Who counts as an authority today?

Certainly people who have something very substantive and valid to say still do. But many authorities have also emerged simply because they have enormous networks through which information flows from all kinds of channels and because they're connected to many different worlds. If we consider why power, money and fame are becoming concentrated in the hands of a few individuals more than ever before — something that is already being studied — it turns out to be purely a matter of networking.

Take Meta, for example. Regardless of what people think of it or whether it benefits or harms society, its influence is inevitably enormous because of how many interested parties and stakeholders its platforms connect.

You can debate whether that's a bad thing, whether it should be banned or encouraged, but objectively speaking, Meta's power is enormous because it has billions of users, all of whom share information and Meta rises to prominence as a result. The same applies to individuals: If someone is well-networked, if they can respond and build connections in a rapidly changing information economy, they inevitably acquire authority, whether they're intelligent or not.

Has networking brought us to the point where visibility has become a skill in its own right?

Yes, visibility has become a skill. That's true.

Today, the term "content creator" is part of our everyday vocabulary: An artist creates a work of art, a writer writes a book, a journalist writes a story, a director makes a film, but a content creator creates "content." Does that term tell us something about how our relationship with creative work or with the act of creating has changed?

Yes, the concept of creative work has changed over time. Historically, creativity was largely a matter of craftsmanship. It then evolved into the ability to create meaning. Today, people are trying to treat content as creative work, but my personal assessment and view is that most content is simply content — filler and an attempt to establish yourself, build an audience and increase your influence. So you can't simply equate content with creative work.

What's the difference between content and creative work?

Content is a form of information — we expect it to interest and engage people and bring recognition and fame to whoever distributes it. You can build a career on it and, let's face it, make money from it as well because in the digital environment every click generates a little bit of money, which eventually adds up to millions. I believe content often isn't created out of a genuine desire to create something of tremendous value, but out of envy — you start creating it because you see someone else doing well and want to achieve the same kind of success or you want to get at someone. The creative aspect is more secondary.

Creative work is something that lives inside a person, wants to come out and speak on a higher level. That doesn't mean creative work has to be put on display — people write novels that they keep in a drawer, paint and make films simply because they have an instinct and a creative drive. When that creative work eventually emerges and competes with content that isn't as strong creatively, I'd like to think that culturally valuable creative work is considerably more powerful content than the kind we were talking about earlier.

If Rembrandt were alive today and posted his work on Instagram, would that make him a content creator?

No, I think he'd still be an artist sharing his work.

Yes, I think so too. But why do we constantly feel such a strong need to publish things? We've talked about various triggers that can lead people to create content and I'd add vanity to the list. A great many people undoubtedly have something to say or create, but what actually drives this stream of content?

You mean from the content creators' perspective? One thing I mentioned was envy. That may sound very harsh. Vanity is also a form of envy in a sense — you want to be better than someone else or look cooler.

You can't paint all content with the same brush because there are very different kinds of content. There's highly practical content where people want to help others and teach them things they know and sincerely believe will be useful to others. That's probably the most benevolent form of content.

Another type of content is advertising, turning yourself into an influencer or promoting yourself. You try to promote certain products or a particular category and establish yourself as an expert in it. As long as you really are an expert, that's fine. But when it becomes purely about showing off, it moves into a third category — simply making a racket and creating noise, which I think accounts for most content today.

It's indiscriminate. At one end, you have memes and jokes, which are fairly mindless entertainment, and at the other, you have insulting people, putting them in their place or pushing ideology, which is where things start getting questionable. So you really can't treat all content as if it were the same.

Can we say that social media's real product isn't content at all, but people's attention?

Yes, it's purely an attention business.

If the social media business is about people's attention, then in a sense you're in the same business as content creators. The advertising industry has also spent decades learning how to capture people's attention. Hasn't the advertising industry itself helped create this world?

It certainly has. Where we are today is that content creators are taking over a significant part of the advertising business. There really are very different kinds of content creators: If it's purely entertainment, I think that's a short-term proposition, but if the content is about helping society and teaching people useful things, then that's a long-term proposition. That's a good partnership between content and advertising.

So could you say that TikTok is, in a sense, the ultimate triumph of the advertising industry's logic?

Given the era we're living in, perhaps it really is, at least for now.

You've said that when something is created, it needs to have cultural significance in addition to its communicative value. But who decides what is meaningful? The creator, the professional, the audience or, ultimately, the algorithm?

They all have a role, but the cultural aspect should come first. In our field, nothing is created without a client. The partnership first has to be between the creator and the client and they need to establish a shared understanding of the cultural dimension. The audience then determines whether it ultimately proves viable as a cultural phenomenon. The algorithm, of course, determines how it's distributed, so all of these things play a role.

I firmly believe that when you're communicating something, it should first and foremost be put through a cultural filter. There's no point in simply polluting the airwaves. If 20 or 30 years ago people used to say that a person saw around 5,000 advertising messages — push or pull messages — a day, today that figure has risen to 50,000. That's an enormous amount of information. If we strip culture out of all those messages or simply ignore it, that's criminal. At least 10 messages a day ought to have a cultural dimension, something that makes us feel what it means to be human and makes us proud to be human.

We've arrived at a point where the ability to create, speak and reach other people has never been greater. That's an enormous freedom, but on the other hand, it means that more and more messages, images, opinions and people are competing for our attention. And all of this still has to be taken in by the same human being whose time and attention are finite.

Last year, you and Indrek Allmann wrote about the proliferation of outdoor advertising, arguing that at some point people simply stop noticing ads because there are limits to how much we can perceive. What happens to us when, in addition to advertising, there is simply too much information of every kind?

We get information overload — an overflow — to the point where we no longer notice absolutely anything.

Indrek Allmann and I wrote about this because we're both trained as architects and studied together and urban space is very important to us. There is a certain hierarchy to urban space. It is designed so that people can coexist, with clear priorities and routes through the city governing how people move around. That has to come first so that people can get around, things can function and everything works properly from a logistical standpoint. For that, you need roads and buildings. Buildings are very important because they reflect the spirit of the era and the social order in which they were created. First and foremost, the logistics and aesthetics have to be right and the city has to function properly.

The layer of advertising on top of that is a commercial layer, something additional. It's very important that it not compete with the primary things that are most important and essential to life, but instead subtly add some kind of value. No one has anything against commerce — I think we would all agree that well-designed and well-displayed advertising can enhance urban space or add value to it. But when advertising is scattered indiscriminately everywhere, across every facade, obscuring the city's primary functions and aesthetics, it starts working against itself. It undermines everything that is culturally and functionally important, damages its own image as well as that of the entire city and its residents and creates a certain sense of agitation. Urban space certainly doesn't need that. What it needs instead is calm and coherence.

That was the perspective we wrote from: If you're going to advertise in a city, there should first be a carefully considered planning phase — at what intervals, how frequently and in what way do we want Tallinn to address people on a commercial level? Many cities have already gone through this exercise, stripping away unsuitable solutions and bringing advertising into harmony with the character of the city.

That's also extremely important for the advertising itself, so that it can have the right impact. The question isn't how much advertising there is, but how precisely it is calibrated and placed so that it enhances life itself.

Let's move from urban space to the broader concept of space. Technology has given us something extraordinary: Within seconds, we can access knowledge that might once have taken months to find. But human thought hasn't accelerated at the same pace. New knowledge has to be compared with what I already know, questioned and, at times, used to revise my existing understanding. Do we have time to do that before the next wave of information arrives?

Definitely not. When we talked about content creation, that's already moving much faster than journalism. Now artificial intelligence has been added to the mix, constantly providing us with information. People are already saying that soon you won't even need to visit websites to buy things. You'll just tell your agent to find all the best deals for you and have them delivered to your home. That drives the pace up so much that eventually you don't remember anything anymore.

We say that Estonia has virtually 100 percent literacy. I would say Estonia has virtually 100 percent reading literacy. There are very few people who can genuinely write or put their thoughts down on paper in a way that is clear, articulate and easy to understand. And that number is shrinking rapidly. I think literacy is a measure of people's ability to navigate the world.

AI generates millions of lines for us, while the internet and social media bombard us with enormous amounts of information. We read it, absorb it, retain hardly any of it — perhaps a small fraction — but then have very little chance of retrieving it again.

That means we're like sponges, our brains filled with tiny fragments and pieces. But to make a decision in life about how to move forward without that decision being largely arbitrary, I think literacy is extremely important. A person needs to be able to prioritize things, say the important things first and perhaps leave the less important things unsaid. The same applies to how we act — ultimately, we have to decide what to do first, what to do second and what to do third.

And what not to do.

Often, what you choose not to do is more important.

If we can't write, then we can't think or make objective decisions either. Instead, we start reacting erratically. We can see this among young people. People who work with 16- to 20-year-olds and those who are a little older see how many problems young people have specifically with cognitive confusion. They're no longer able to respond appropriately to external stimuli — they either become angry, retreat into a corner and withdraw or stop communicating with anyone. There is a great deal of suicidal ideation, overdoses and substance use. I think much of this is because people no longer know how to express themselves and the reason for that, in turn, is that they never learned how to write. I would draw a direct connection between the two.

When I was preparing for this program, I was thinking that the world is changing faster than we're able to keep up with it intellectually or adapt to it. But listening to you, it sounds as though we're not merely failing to keep up — we're actually going backward. In some respects, we're regressing.

I wouldn't necessarily say we're regressing.

In literacy, we are.

Yes, we're definitely regressing when it comes to literacy. This is purely my own theory, but a person's thinking moves at the same speed as their writing — it's not even about how quickly they think. If they can't write, they can't grasp the pace at which they should be moving. They think they're moving much faster than they actually are.

In a sense, it's the second law of thermodynamics or entropy: Everything and every process accelerates until eventually you end up with one great mass of plasma. We somehow have to avoid, slow down or resist that entropy as much as we can and I think writing is one very good exercise for doing that.

I recently visited the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow and saw Rembrandt's "Landscape with the Good Samaritan." At first glance, it's a breathtaking, almost three-dimensional landscape, but if you keep looking, tiny details and human figures begin to emerge and it's only through them that the story Rembrandt is telling reveals itself. Standing there, I wondered what would happen if I looked at the painting at the same pace I look at images on my phone: a moment, then on to the next. That's actually what I did at first. But then I went back — otherwise, I would have seen the painting without ever really seeing it.

That's true.

Are we seeing more and more, but noticing less and less?

A huge amount of information is being placed within our field of vision, but we certainly don't process it to the same extent that people did in Rembrandt's time, for example.

Speaking of books and the learned people of the Renaissance who had read a great deal, I once heard a historian make a very interesting point on a program: People might have owned 10 or 15 books and they would spend their entire lives reading those 15 books, some of them many times over.

The Bible, for example.

The Bible was one, but all kinds of literature circulated at the time: natural science, philosophy, fiction. People simply had so little information available to them that they had to go over the same things repeatedly, discovering new dimensions each time. Out of that emerged their own philosophy or view of society, which they then applied as broadly as possible. If you had a single book that you read a hundred times, that was what gave things depth. It's the same experience you had with the Rembrandt: You looked at it several times and discovered new layers.

Today, people have a million books and an endless amount of information that can be acquired very quickly from everywhere, but they don't really look deeply into things. As a result, they can't draw conclusions or develop far-reaching ideas.

So understanding meaning takes time?

Yes, it takes time.

But we don't have time because there's too much information.

Yes.

If information and complexity keep increasing faster than we can process them, perhaps our natural defense mechanism is to simplify the world — to choose the people and channels we trust and the explanations that fit our existing worldview. Could it be that the more information we have, the greater our need for simple answers becomes?

Definitely. If we look at what's happening in global politics, it's a good illustration of that in a sense: There are "us" and "them." The narratives are very simple. Objectivity and intelligent discussion don't get you very far. It's just a quick swipe left or right — does it fit or doesn't it? The more clamor, noise and competition for attention there is, the faster we adopt that way of thinking in today's noise economy.

We can measure very precisely how much time someone spent looking at something, where they clicked, what they shared and how long they remained engaged. Has the ease of measuring these things led us to confuse two completely different things — attention and value?

The thing about any kind of measurement is that the more you measure, the more you realize you should have been measuring something else entirely. We know from quantum physics that as soon as you start observing something, it changes its position, state, form or trajectory.

The same applies to people and all kinds of other phenomena. Thinking we know something is one thing; as soon as we start measuring it, we discover numerous exceptions and different dimensions. Measuring the value of things is extremely difficult work that requires prolonged, systematic thought and experimentation.

The measurement models we use today aren't particularly well thought out. They're more like measuring sticks hastily thrown together. I'm not against measuring or comparing things, but you can't do it in a single dimension. You have to do it across multiple dimensions at once, while also allowing for the possibility that some things simply can't be measured.

And what can be measured very accurately inevitably starts to seem more important than what can't be measured — in other words, value?

Unfortunately, yes.

Is the ability to engage deeply with something becoming a privilege in today's world?

I think it's not merely a privilege, but a luxury.

At the same time, time itself may become one of the most valuable cultural resources of all.

It already is. Time is subjective, of course: Some people are very quick thinkers, time passes more slowly for younger people and much faster for older people. Given the sheer volume of information surrounding us and the situation we're in, where we're effectively compelled to consume it, being able to switch off from that pressure and return to yourself for a while is an enormous luxury. In theory, we should be able to manage that ourselves, but we're becoming less and less capable of doing so.

We've already talked about literacy as something that could become a prerequisite for privilege in the future. Will someone who can stay focused on a single thing for at least half an hour, without constantly jumping between different devices and streams of information, also have a competitive advantage?

Yes, I think even half an hour is genuinely a luxury now. What I do is occasionally set aside an entire day for one thing and then I feel as though I'm indulging myself completely — imagine that, I have a whole day to think about a single idea! But usually something comes out of it: an article, a concept or simply an original line of thought. That in itself gives me great satisfaction, but given today's volume of information and the pace of life, setting aside a day like that is very difficult.

Clearly, our problem isn't a lack of information. Rather, we've reached a point where there's so much of it that we don't have time to think it through and make it meaningful to ourselves. But there's a danger in this line of reasoning: We may start underestimating people themselves. Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. We learned to live with the printing press, radio, television and the arrival of the internet and technology has mostly enriched our lives. Maybe we're simply in the middle of another major transformation and are looking at it from too close up. Why shouldn't people learn to cope with the flood of information as well?

We certainly will. Speaking of the printing press ... A little-known fact is that Gutenberg initially went bankrupt with his printing press. His son tried to revive the business idea, but eventually the bank took it over. The bank, which had extended them substantial credit in the form of paper — which they couldn't turn into sales because no one wanted their books — eventually took the operation to Venice. Because so many trade routes converged there and thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of people from around the world passed through, all wanting to experience the new invention, the book business began to flourish.

It's the same with today's abundance of information — AI has democratized information in the same way that the printing press democratized the written word and ideas. And it, too, has to find its place.

As for social media, I predict enormous changes there. In its current form, it won't be sustainable for very long. It has become purely a channel for delivering advertising and people will eventually get tired of it.

What might that evolution look like?

It could develop in tandem with AI. There's been quite a lot of philosophizing about this and there are several possible directions.

One possibility is that social media moves further toward commerce and becomes a sales channel where the content we were talking about earlier takes on a certain purpose in the context of selling things.

Another possibility is newer social media platforms such as Substack. Even X, formerly Twitter, has changed a great deal. Substack has more in-depth content, with specialists sharing their expertise, offering advice and publishing articles.

Perhaps these newer directions will become more prominent because AI can provide us with information very quickly. We won't need to look for it on Instagram anymore; we'll simply ask AI directly.

So some kind of change has to happen. AI is developing at such a ferocious pace that at some point the bubble either has to burst or deflate somewhat. Then we'll find out whether AI is a tool, a competitor to humans or whether it will merge with humans to form a single organism. In short, something is going to happen and only then will we really understand where we are.

That merging sounds like a pretty bleak future.

Who knows? Maybe it's part of evolution. We simply don't know how to assess it yet.

Right now, AI is a tool and an accelerator. It can be used to generate endless amounts of text, images, music and video. If there is no longer any limit to the production of information, while human attention remains finite, what becomes valuable? The ability to choose?

Curation. In advertising, for example, people say that if AI were to learn to produce genuinely high-quality images on its own — which it undoubtedly can't do today; it has to be guided and is a partner to the designer — and the same applies to writing, since it can't produce proper Estonian, while it does a little better in English, though there are widespread complaints about its choice of words and subject matter — then humans will have to move increasingly higher up Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But there may be a limit. People say AI is limitless, while human intelligence has limits.

Taste is what decides. Although there's also debate about what taste ultimately is, you can't calculate taste in advance — you can analyze it afterward, but not predict it beforehand. I think that's ultimately where humans will end up: as curators or selectors. And as AI makes its way into robots that will physically perform various tasks, the tasteful management of the entire system will become all the more important.

So at the moment, the cultural impact of AI isn't bad content, but an enormous amount of perfectly competent, mediocre content.

You wrote in July that you no longer listen to news radio and have given up television news and discussion programs. Is that your way of protecting your attention?

Yes, absolutely. I do it so I don't allow ideas into my head that might consume me for half the day, give me obsessive thoughts or make me dwell on things I really don't need to be thinking about — things whose absence leaves no void in my life.

How do you fill that time? We talked a little about how you can spend an entire day thinking about a single idea.

You can. That's one part of it.

The other is that I choose my own battles and the information I consume, and I listen to a lot of books as well as read them. I've limited myself to certain authors. For example, lately I've been reading only Murakami because I wanted to immerse myself in his work — something contemporary.

Welcome to the club!

Maybe it's some kind of trend, but at the same time, I really enjoy the way he puts words together. I'm also a huge science fiction fan and I think science fiction is something I don't have to read — I can happily listen to it while doing other things. On top of that, there are two or three podcasts I listen to regularly and, frankly, that satisfies all my media needs.

Returning briefly to AI, Isaac Asimov was writing visions of the future decades ago and, among other things, formulated the Three Laws of Robotics. As we may recall, one of them says that a robot — or, today, we might substitute AI — must not harm a human being. Do you see the potential for harm to humans becoming a reality? In other words, are we moving away from Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics?

I think it was a major mistake that the creators of AI didn't build Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into AI from the outset. I know Anthropic has created something analogous, at least in the form of an ethical framework, but I don't know about OpenAI or Google. I don't think AI itself poses a genuine threat to people today. The real danger is another person using AI and forcing it to do something that AI makes much easier to accomplish.

For example, killing someone in the war in Ukraine?

Killing someone, for example. But that's still a human choice — a human being presses the button. I've seen freely available demo videos on YouTube of Palantir's AI-based targeting systems and it's staggering. I was dumbfounded by the way AI identifies targets and sets priorities. But it was programmed by humans and, ultimately, within its enormous blockchain-based system, it still asks a human whether to carry out the decision. A human presses the button.

So AI isn't the dangerous one. Another human being is still more dangerous.

Let's talk a little more about deep focus. Should we consciously train our ability to concentrate deeply the way we train our biceps at the gym? Is it even possible to train that ability?

That's a very interesting question. I don't even know whether it's a cultural or biological question — the brain is a muscle, after all. Clearly, it can be trained to a certain extent and people have different capabilities. But first, people should learn to distinguish what they don't need to engage deeply with, what they can safely set aside. A great deal of the content we talked about at the beginning could simply be left out, leaving much more room for what's useful. And there's a hierarchy there that everyone has to construct for themselves.

Algorithms don't exactly encourage that.

No.

I've even found myself looking at something an acquaintance posted on Instagram and suddenly realizing an hour has gone by.

Yes, that's happened to me too. I think something similar has happened to everyone who has a cellphone and a social media account, but we have to learn to manage it consciously.

In other words, train our attention.

When you looked back on the early days of your agency Tank in 2020, on its 25th anniversary, you said that since 1995 your internal battle cry had been: Don't let stupidity win. We've been talking about a world in which everyone has the opportunity to speak, there is more information than ever before and producing it is becoming easier and easier. In light of all that, are you optimistic about humanity?

Of course I'm optimistic. People are better off than ever before. First, there are more people on Earth than ever before, scientific and technological progress is faster than it has ever been and the pace is only accelerating. Whether we can keep up with it is another matter.

Humanity is on the threshold of an existential transformation and the information we've been discussing plays a very important role in that. Information has never been more accessible or more democratized and it is becoming increasingly so. It is essentially impossible to stop that or put the brakes on it.

Sooner or later, it will take us to some new level of consciousness. We simply live in this environment. The question is whether we manage the process ourselves and have clear ideas about where it goes next or leave it entirely to chance and nature.

I definitely believe humanity has tremendous potential to become much better. The question is whether we can reach agreements among different interests and political agendas. Every day, it becomes clearer that this planet is a relatively small place inhabited by 8 billion people. If the Strait of Hormuz is closed, gasoline prices rise in Estonia — the butterfly effect is powerful and tangible. Or take the ship that got stuck across the Suez Canal and goods stopped arriving ...

There are all kinds of things that show us how small the world is and how, instead of fighting one another, we ought to stick together. The war in Ukraine demonstrates very clearly how pointless such a conflict is, how many people are killed and how much it affects overall well-being across the globe.

If the abundance of information could teach us to be more considerate of one another, we could reach the next level, which is cooperation. Within a few decades, we'll probably be an interplanetary species and there's no stopping developments in space exploration anymore. There are so many fascinating things to explore and do and doing them as a united humanity whose members respect one another would be much easier and would allow us to move to the next level. I think AI will definitely contribute to that in the long run.

Speaking of cooperation among people, it seems to me that becoming more immersed in the virtual world doesn't increase cooperation but reduces it because people are becoming increasingly isolated in their own bubbles.

Yes, they are. That's what we were talking about earlier with social media — it has a very powerful bubble-forming effect, bringing people with similar interests together in the same places through algorithms.

I sincerely hope this is simply a transitional phase or something that people will begin consciously addressing and correcting. Today, this fragmentation into bubbles certainly serves the interests of certain groups, systems and political agendas, but history has shown that such structures don't last forever.

If your internal battle cry has been "Don't let stupidity win," then how is the battle going right now? Joel Volkov, is stupidity winning?

There's quite a lot of stupidity around, but I'm deeply convinced that stupidity won't win.

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