When I was a kid, my Mum always said ‘learn to cook, people always need to eat’.

This is wisdom.

What is also wisdom is that, just as people need to eat, they also like to have sex. So that is also a ‘growth’ industry. And when they have sex, they tend to make more little people.

More people means more of everything that people have to have. Food, sex, shelter and, in civilised places, education, purpose, work etc.

More people also mean more creation – because humans inherently create things (aside from other humans), we create mostly waste. But in all this waste there are some incredibly valuable things. This creates another secondary need – ways to find the value in all the noise.

Nothing new in this, there are many existing metaphors for this idea, including:

Needles in haystacks, money in the muck, diamonds in the rough, noise vs signal.

When the internet meets the AI age, we are at an unprecedented intersection of unparalleled creation of digital content. Again – true to form, humans excel at creating far more shite than gold, which again requires effective ways of finding the value at atleast the same speed as always, if not faster. But the volume of shite is doubling almost every 90 days.

So how to manage this mess?