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Originally Posted by susan_cassidy
How can salt ever be in short supply, if one has access to the ocean? I've always wondered that. There was a rumor about salt being in short supply when I lived in Hawaii!?!
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There's a great book called 'Salt: A World History'. I'm sure your answer is in there (or even the Wikipedia summary of the book).
Something can be plentiful without being accessible. There's plenty of Deuterium and Tritium in the ocean as well, but we still haven't figured out how to generate economically sustainable energy from it, except in theory. It has to do with what the available technology is capable of at any given time.
The existence of ebooks is disruptive by its very nature. It only took an Amazon to make use of available technology to set it in motion. It is predictable that publishers would attempt to preserve their business model, but in the end they will adapt, or die.
In any case, the overall revenue stream for book publishing will decline. This has been happening in the music publishing industry for the last ten years in its digital transition, and eventually, it looks like some subscription service like Spotify will be taking in most of the money. Content creators will at best get a large slice of a smaller pie, and will increasingly be joined by AI's that are capable of generating and curating content (undercutting Spotify, as AI's are happy to work for free). It is playing out a little differently with ebooks, but I think we'll wind up in a similar situation eventually.
I think that reading itself has also passed peak velocity. Neurologically it is a difficult task, requiring many thousands of hours to master, and as a way of understanding, vicariously experiencing, and learning things, it is horribly inefficient (I'm experimenting with Kindle's Word Runner and Spritz BeeLine with other apps, which promise modest speed improvements, but even this requires significant brain rewiring). Speech is even slower, though it's more flexible. What would be the point of 'downloading' directly to the brain (assuming that does not violate physics), which is just going to immediately distort and degrade the information?
As we externalize more of our cognitive tasks to AIs and are surrounded by embedded intelligent agents of many kinds, we (not necessarily ourselves, depending on how long we're around) will need to shift our focus somewhere else. Where will that be?
I've been reading 'The Rise of the Robots'. Highly recommended.