Not in the purely mathematical sense, but in the broader philosophical and economic sense. The idea that underneath technology, money, markets, AI, the internet, and maybe even civilization itself, there is one thing constantly being optimized:
The flow of information.
And once you begin looking at the world through that lens, it becomes difficult to unsee it.
The Internet Was Never Just About Websites
One realization that struck me is that the internet's true power was not social media, websites, or even entertainment.
Its real power was reducing the friction of information transfer.
Before the internet:
- knowledge was geographically constrained,
- distribution was expensive,
- communication was slower,
- expertise was gatekept.
Today, a teenager in Nairobi can:
- learn software engineering from YouTube,
- access MIT lectures,
- build products online,
- work remotely,
- publish ideas globally,
- create businesses from a laptop.
That is not a small shift.
That is civilization-level leverage.
The internet massively accelerated information flow, and when information flows faster, coordination improves. And when coordination improves, economies grow.
A huge amount of economic progress is simply the result of reducing friction between:
- people,
- knowledge,
- resources,
- decisions,
- and action.
M-Pesa Is More Revolutionary Than People Realize
I think mobile money is one of the clearest examples of this.
Take M-Pesa in Kenya.
Before mobile money, sending money involved:
- buses,
- physical cash,
- delays,
- trust issues,
- travel,
- middlemen.
Now money moves almost instantly through phones.
What changed?
Not the concept of value itself.
What changed was the speed and reliability of financial information transfer.
A payment system is essentially:
- a communication system,
- a verification system,
- and a trust system.
M-Pesa compressed economic coordination into seconds.
That increased:
- liquidity,
- business activity,
- financial participation,
- and economic velocity.
This is why payment infrastructure matters so much.
Fast information flow creates fast economies.
AI Feels Like the Next Information Explosion
The more I think about AI, the more I realize it may become another massive acceleration layer.
The internet democratized access to information.
AI may democratize execution itself.
Previously, even if you had ideas, building software required years of technical knowledge.
Now someone can:
- prototype applications,
- automate workflows,
- generate designs,
- write code,
- analyze documents,
- and learn interactively using AI tools.
The bottleneck is slowly shifting from:
"Can you technically execute?"
toward:
"Can you think clearly about problems worth solving?"
That is a profound shift.
I genuinely think we are entering a world where more humans become builders.
Intelligence Is Becoming Infrastructure
Electricity became infrastructure.
The internet became infrastructure.
Cloud computing became infrastructure.
Now intelligence itself may become infrastructure.
That sounds dramatic, but think about it carefully.
For most of history, expert-level reasoning was scarce and expensive.
Today AI systems can assist with:
- programming,
- writing,
- tutoring,
- translation,
- design,
- research,
- customer support,
- analysis.
Not perfectly. Not autonomously. But increasingly well.
The cost of accessing useful intelligence is falling.
And historically, whenever something powerful becomes dramatically cheaper, entire industries reorganize around it.
Maybe the Future Belongs to Friction Reducers
One pattern I keep noticing is this:
The largest technology companies often win because they reduce friction.
- Google reduced search friction.
- Amazon reduced shopping friction.
- Uber reduced transportation friction.
- Netflix reduced media access friction.
- M-Pesa reduced transaction friction.
This makes me wonder whether future opportunities will increasingly belong to people who can identify areas where:
- coordination is slow,
- communication is inefficient,
- trust is weak,
- or execution is unnecessarily difficult.
Because solving those problems is really solving information problems.
Wealth Creation Might Increasingly Be About Information Leverage
I also think the nature of wealth creation is changing.
In older economies, leverage came mostly from:
- land,
- factories,
- labor,
- capital ownership.
Now leverage increasingly comes from:
- software,
- media,
- networks,
- audiences,
- automation,
- and information systems.
One person with a laptop and AI tools can now build things that once required:
- teams,
- offices,
- infrastructure,
- and significant capital.
That changes the economics of creation.
It also changes what skills matter.
The Skills That May Matter More in the Future
Ironically, as AI becomes better at execution, purely technical skill may become less scarce.
The more valuable skills may become:
- judgment,
- systems thinking,
- taste,
- trust,
- communication,
- leadership,
- adaptability,
- and understanding human behavior.
Because when tools become abundant, deciding what should be built becomes more important than merely building.
I think this is one reason authentic people and trusted communities may become even more valuable in the future.
As AI-generated content explodes, trust becomes scarce.
And scarcity creates value.
Maybe Civilization Is Ultimately an Information System
This may sound abstract, but I increasingly think civilization itself is a giant coordination engine.
Money coordinates resources.
Markets coordinate incentives.
The internet coordinates knowledge.
AI coordinates intelligence.
And technology advances civilization primarily by improving:
- communication,
- synchronization,
- prediction,
- and resource allocation.
Maybe that is the deeper pattern underneath everything.
The future may belong to the people who best understand how information moves:
- between humans,
- between systems,
- between markets,
- and between ideas and execution.
Because increasingly, information is not just part of the economy.
It is becoming the economy.