• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Deliberate and purposeful are words I would use to describe Tom Chi, author and founding member of At One Ventures, which backs early-stage seed rounds. 

Chi has a theory. He describes it in his new book titled Climate Capital, which warns advertisers and brands about climate change and more importantly, “despoiling” the core resources of humans -- their cognitive abilities.

"We spent most of the twentieth century strip-mining many of the physical resources of the planet, and now see the ecological consequences having developed that ability since the industrial revolution,” Chi said during an interview with MediaPost.

Chi also cofounded Google X, where he led the teams that created self-driving cars, deep learning artificial intelligence (AI), wearable augmented reality (AR), and the expansion of internet connectivity.

He played a significant role in established projects with global reach including Microsoft (Outlook) and Yahoo such as Search and Answers. 

"Since the industrial revolution we have been wiping out entire ecosystems," Chi said during an interview with MediaPost, estimating the world has “increased the extinction rate by a factor from 100 to 1,000.”

Chi believes humanity will “spend most of the twenty-first century strip-mining cognitive resources of the planet.”

Cognitive strip-mining is a metaphor used to describe how modern technological environments and systems that attract the attention of humans and exhaust their mental capacity, leaving humans cognitively depleted.

"I look now at the landscape of software, where so much of our current systems are designed to constantly interrupt our chain of thought for the benefit of advertisers, and see the countless hours where the precious time that people have on this Earth disappears into the intentions and messages of others," Chi wrote in a passage of his book.

Advertising plays a key role in this depletion. “Cognitive resources are a finite resource,” Chi told MediaPost.

“Humanity is despoiling the core resources of cognitive admission with social media through dopamine loops, advertising and misinformation,” Chi added.

It’s moving humans into an addictive pattern, when you think about an ecosystem where everything has been denominationalized into the one productive, destruction of an ecosystem.

“A forest is no longer supporting millions of organisms in the deep rich web,” Chi said. “The forest becomes dementalized into boards or metric tons of pulp for paper processing.”

The goal of connecting content creators and algorithms at the end of the day becomes the mastery and addiction of dopamine loops where people cannot pull themselves away. This consumes a finite number of hours in a person’s life.

“Even if you have a great experience in social media, the proportion has grown so large that the opportunity is probably too large in a person's life,” Chi added. “Today we don’t think about it like that, because we are not used to talking about cognitive strip-mining.”

Not yet, anyway.