New virtues in the information age
Adaptability: The ability to quickly change course, learn new ideas, abandon old paradigms will allow one to more gracefully and opportunistically navigate the relentless changes in the world due to rapid technological progress and adoption.
Agency: In this GenAI world everyone wants to be “High Agency”. This is someone who takes matters into their hands and imposes their will on the world. Proactive, growth mindset, resourceful. The tools and information make so much possible, you almost just need to be willing to keep using them.
Ambition: It’s possible to achieve so much more as a motivated and open-minded individual than it ever was. Having ambition allows you to benefit from all this variance.
Attention span: Maybe having a short attention span is actually adaptive to an environment with such large information diets. You need to be able to decide quickly if something is worth engaging with. Maybe one can have a short attention span for most things, and a longer one for the things that are really interesting.
Influence: Media has become so much more plural, it is easier to be a celebrated individual in smaller niches.
Hackiness: (as in hackathon not hacking computers) If you’re someone who likes to make things, especially software, you can be very wealthy and shape society. The consequence of the things you are able to build in your house has never been so big. Virtue consists in always building and tinkering.
Media literacy: There are many more ways to end up consuming misinformation and media that is harmful to your perception of reality and relationship with others. Having the skills to critically examine a piece of media, or managing your media diet are particularly important.
Privacy: It’s now important to care about your privacy and who is watching, because they can get a lot more information out of you, and do more with that information.
Numeracy: Mathematics is slightly more relevant to everyday life because of its synergy with computers.
Intellectual talent: It’s on average a better time to be nerdy, and good with words and numbers as knowledge work is very significant (though this may change soon with AI!)
Entrepreneurship: You can find a way to contact anyone in the world, build so much from your home, do business with anyone in the world, create media, deploy AI agents, et cetera. You really just have to have the talent to combine things together.
Probably many more!