Technology is moving at warp speed, and even then, the rate of advancements continues to accelerate at an exponential pace. In The Singularity is Near written 20 years ago, there’s an amazing quote:

This concept is what Ray Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns. What we’re seeing today. Exponential growth of one huge technological advancement compounds. Ripples turn into a tsunami.

Some concepts we have mental models for today. We can grasp the present clearly, but often our vision of the future is hazy, as is how we can, should, and will use technology. Steve Jobs eloquently put it:

Often, we don’t know what we want unless there’s a better option right in front of us. Henry Ford is often quoted with the saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Although the provenance of this quote is not provable other than anecdotally through an oral tradition.

Many people can’t fathom what's next and have a strange aversion to giving whatever it is a shot. While advancements are picking up at a dizzying pace, fear of the unknown will not unlock progress.

Unfortunately, negativity bias has been reinforced in our society. Algorithmically through social, news, and entertainment, because clickbait drives more attention value, page views, and ad revenue.

Like the based Jay Z line, “Got beef with radio if I don't play their show. They don't play my hits, well, I don't give a shit, so Rap mags try and use my black ass. So advertisers can give 'em more cash for ads.”

In the spirit of Marc Andreessen's post Software is Eating the World, AI is eating search, and many publishers are drowning in infrastructure cost because websites are constantly getting hammered with AI crawler traffic, massively inflating hosting bills. To make the value exchange between knowledge extraction and compensation more equitable, one cloud hosting provider is now charging pay per crawl.

Why should the knowledge-sharing economy be any different? Where's the pay-per-lesson unlock? When will edutainment start to be monetized? I think the new base app is pointing toward this future.

On a Gartner hype cycle, I believe early adopters often think in positive-sum terms, while the laggards may see things as a zero-sum game. But for people to thrive in today's world, we must cultivate a childlike sense of wonder, possibility, and curiosity, but through a pragmatic lens of applied knowledge. What is the TL;DR? Why should I care? What are the most popular cost-effective solutions out there? 

There's the old colloquialism you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. Well, very quickly, the human race is becoming the old dog, and tech advancements are beginning to eclipse our ability to successfully drink from the firehose without learning new tricks. Today I learned… more than yesterday, is my mantra.

Still there’s a lot of siloed knowledge and the subject matter experts who are best suited to teach people who only have a peripheral understanding of core concepts. You also don’t know what you don’t know. There are lots of rabbit holes to go down with this lack of knowledge, and on top of this, there are many false prophets. We all need a buddy to say, "read this, not that, try this, not that".

In business, there’s a lot of talk about sales-led growth, marketing-led growth, product-led growth… increasingly, community-led growth, founder-led growth, and media-led growth are becoming new areas of focus and greater growth drivers because they’re not capital-intensive ways to find true fans and product market fit by creating a flywheel effect.  

There are lots of unknowns and uncertainty about how technology will shape the future of work, the future of finance, future of education. In short, we live in two parallel worlds of the sharing economy (ex. Uber) and the knowledge economy (ex. Perplexity). I think the next wave of content consumption will bend toward edutainment and focus on curiosity-led growth. 

That’s why I have decided to wrap my arms around the concept of the knowledge-sharing economy. Because no one individual can learn everything fast enough to be fully up to speed and keep track of all of the cutting-edge advancements in tech. Join me, coin this post, and let's learn better together.