That is to say, it's not necessarily the amount of information that's daunting for us, but rather the form of it. We can scan a savannah and know what's important much easier than we can scan a bunch of Facebook posts. Mostly that's because the posts are made up of words, which require another level of symbolic interpretation before we know if we are interested in them.
But as the battles over Twitter's trending topics (why isn't #ows trending?) testify, our human intuitions don't always match an algorithm's. We place the emphases on different data than the machines do, at least some of the time.
Perhaps there are ways in which we can make all this data sensible to us intuitively, so that we can put our brain's filters to work instead of or alongside the machines' algorithms. In our interview, I asked Wright, who is notorious for making products that grew out of cultural ideas and books and theories, what he was reading. He told me that he's been rereading and looking at a lot of information design, stuff like Edward Tufte's work. Later, he revealed -- inasmuch as Wright reveals things -- that he wants to find ways to visualize our media consumption.
I thought I saw, for a flash, a future in which human beings did not outsource all the complex work of understanding our social relationships or consumption to algorithms. I don't know precisely what Wright is working on, but it seemed like he was hinting at a way to display information that would harness our brain's built-in filters, the intelligence we know we have but can't consciously access.