3–4 minutes

As we are all aware: time is finite.

Most of the limited time we have is spent on things we have to do. Activities such as working, sleeping, running arranges and spending quality time with friends and family goes first-hand throughout the day.

So, with the time we have in the day, there is an even lesser portion in which we are actually able to enjoy entertainment and other forms of “wants” rather than the “needs” we have to attend to. Including “wants” that could fall into “needs” later on in life, like spending one’s free time studying for a potential career change.

Because of this: it is therefore important to take the time one has to do things one wants to do rather then to waste it on fluff, fuss and fillers clogging the ways to gain access to the content we want see.

In modern times: it is getting increasingly more difficult to only get the content you want. The internet is a massive stream of content. The phrase “100 channels, nothing to watch” referring to television always comes to mind when talking about the size of the internet. But online, on the other hand, the phrase is closer to “one million channels, nothing to watch”. And too is the content pool getting larger by each passing day as well.

Everyone and everything is “fighting” to be the one content stream the viewer consumes with the limited leisure time they have.

This is—of course—an issue.

A.I. and the Already Overblown Content Pool

With the ability to generate text, articles and even entire books within literal seconds, there is a frequent question which keeps popping up amongst those who are worried about the artificially created work. Though the question comes in many forms: the core concern they all boil down to is “how can you compete with a computer?”.

The overflowing amount of content available online seem to have been created recently. Especially with artificial intelligence flooding social media and other types of platforms. But, this is not the case at all.

I will use books as the example. Lets say that a person reads one book per week. Over the course of a year, that is 52 books. Over the course of 60 years (being extremely generous here and assuming they live until they are 80ish), that is 3120 books one person will read throughout their lifetime.

According to the ISBN Database: Google estimated 130 million books worldwide in 2010 (source can be found here).
If a person read 3120 books until their death in 2010: that means that they had read 0,0024 percent of the amount of books that existed during their lifetime. And this number is from a time period when artificial intelligence was not really spoken of in any meaningful way. The hype surrounding AI is something which has come up recently. The issue with being overburdened by the available content is not new in any sense of the word.

The fear of artificial intelligence being the death of the market for an overblown content availability is nonsense. The world has always been larger than a singular person are able to consume within their lifetime. It might just seem impossible now because of the news coverage and the social media feeds being flooded with fearmongering content of their own.

For when you zoom out and view the world for the size it truly is do you realize how small of a portion we as individual people are able to bare.

And it has always been like that.