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What he found was that—in the absence of a perpetually-growing economy—community and culture are key. He quotes, for example, the historian Juliet Schor’s view of working life in the Middle Ages: “The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking …All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.”

Reading this took me back to a childhood fed by TV programmes like the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, which had informed me that by now robots would be doing all the menial work, leaving humans free to relax and enjoy an abundance of leisure time. So it came as a shock to realise that the good folk of the Middle Ages were enjoying far more of it than we are in our technologically-advanced society. What gives? Fleming explains, “In a competitive market economy a large amount of roughly-equally-shared leisure time – say, a three-day working week, or less – is hard to sustain, because any individuals who decide to instead work a full week can produce for a lower price (by working longer hours than the competition they can produce a greater quantity of goods and services, and thus earn the same wage by selling each one more cheaply). These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and would put the more leisurely out of business completely. This is what puts the grim into reality.”

The problem with Montezuma’s Revenge is that it doesn’t provide regular rewards for the AI agent. It’s a puzzle-platformer where players have to explore an underground pyramid, dodging traps and enemies while collecting keys that unlock doors and special items. If you were training an AI agent to beat the game, you could reward it for staying alive and collecting keys, but how do you teach it to save certain keys for certain items, and use those items to overcome traps and complete the level? The answer: curiosity.

We inhabit a world of niche interests and platforms and distractions, where everyone is supposedly paying attention to their own thing. Unlike the mass-audience days of I Love Lucy—a show that commanded a remarkable 71 percent of television eyeballs in 1953—today you can happily silo yourself from signals that you don’t care about. Our attention spans are shrinking. Axios reported this week that more than 70 percent of the American population regularly uses another digital device while watching TV. It’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018; there’s too much to read and watch, too much to look at.

As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.”

“The way to disempower Trump is to ignore him, but it’s too hard even for his opponents to do it,” Wu told me over the phone recently. “It has to be a pure attention battle. If you were another network and Trump was I Love Lucy, what do you do? You can’t necessarily spend all your time criticizing I Love Lucy because that will just build it up. You need your own programming and to develop your own characters and celebrities who have to be as interesting and compelling. You need to have your own show. And I don’t think Democrats have their own show other than the ‘I Hate Trump’ show.”