🔮 Exponential View #558: Davos & reinventing the world; OpenAI's funk; markets love safety; books are cool, robots & AI Squid Game++

Hi all,

I just got back from Davos, and this year was different. The AI discussion was practical – CEOs asking each other what’s actually happening with their workforces, which skills matter now. At the same time, I saw leaders struggling to name the deeper shifts reshaping our societies. Mark Carney came closest, and in this week’s essay I pick up his argument and extend it through the Exponential View lens.

Enjoy!

Davos and civilizational OS

Mark Carney delivered a speech that will echo for a long time, about “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” Carney was talking about treaties and trade but the fictions unravelling go much deeper.

Between 2010 and 2017, three fundamental inputs to human progress – energy, intelligence, and biology – crossed a threshold. Each moved from extraction to learning, from “find it and control it” to “build it and improve it.” This is not a small shift. It is an upgrade to the operating system of civilization. For most of history, humanity ran on what I call the Scarcity OS – resources are limited, so the game is about finding them, controlling them, defending your share. This changed with the three crossings. As I write in my essay this weekend:

In each of the three crossings, a fundamental input to human flourishing moved from a regime of extraction, where the resource is fixed, contested, and depleting, to a regime of learning curves, where the resource improves with investment and scales with production.

At Davos, I saw three responses: the Hoarder who concludes the game is zero-sum (guess who), the Manager who tries to patch the system (Carney), and the Builder who sees that the pie is growing and the game is not about dividing but creating more. The loudest voices in public right now are hoarders, the most respectable are managers, and the builders are too busy building to fight the political battle. The invitation of this moment? Not to mourn the fictions, but to ask: what was I actually doing that mattered, and how much more of it can I do now?

Full reflections in this week’s essay:

Finding new alpha

OpenAI was the dominant player in the chatbot economy, but we’re in the agent economy now. This economy will be huge, arguably thousands of times bigger1 but it’s an area OpenAI is currently