Attention is all you need
A title famous for all the right reasons, but something I feel being increasingly influential in my personal life as well. I was waiting at the signal today and saw someone cross one end of the road, waiting for the other end to turn red. The first thing they did while waiting was pull out their phone to doomscroll. Can we not go a few seconds without tuning into the digital world to focus on crossing a busy road? There are a thousand different distractions to capture our limited attention, making it harder by the day to focus on a single task for a prolonged period of time. Funnily, as we focus on increasing the length horizon of tasks being carried out by LLMs, there is an inverse decrease in the amount of time we can focus on a singular task ourselves. Claude ruminates more than humans do now, and while it ruminates on the task the human gave it to do, the human themself switch between three different windows to glean more random information. With AI slop flooding everywhere, I...