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 find it ironical how companies are using the LLM-based attention to now capture human attention, clipping its wings.

I had dinner the other day with a friend, and he casually mentioned that he has run out of things to watch on Netflix, which is an alarming signal towards the uncharted territory we are treading on. We are constantly hopping from one show or movie to another to fill the empty void of entertainment, but we are not processing or learning from what we watch. We always need more digital content (hence shorter) to satisfy us, and the constant shifts in the source of this satisfaction is evolving how long we can pay attention. I recently watched a beautiful movie Homebound, that touches on the migrant struggles during Covid, and realized that I seem to have completely forgotten about that time just five years down the line. Constant bombardment of new news from all sides of life is painting the picture I am retaining in my mind. We have stopped taking a step back to understand and deliberate on the information being received. 

All digital entertainment sources are optimized to give a dopamine hit, but we seem to be trading long-term gains for these short-term perceived gains. Time spent on earth is a monotonously increasing function, and we are inching a day closer to the end always. What we spend our time is an important choice and thus making it a valued commodity! 

How long can you read a book without reaching out for your phone to scroll mindlessly?

From personal experience, I have all the time to scroll Twitter to find important papers to stay up to date, but how much time is actually being devoted to read them thoroughly. Compared to earlier times, I feel now, on average, we ingest a greater amount of information, but the low number of bits being provided by this information due to a lack of pondering (what LLMs are improving on) seems to be reducing any gains from this information ingestion. 

This lack of attention in everything we do is being ingrained more deeply in our lifestyle than we like, as it's scaling our impatience and expectations in all spheres of life. Why can't I solve this immediately? Why can't I get my groceries right now? Why is the food delivery agent taking so long? Why do I have to learn this anymore when I can watch a video anytime? Why can't I reach my destination faster? 

We are working on prolonging the end of life and raising our expectations to decrease the time to reach the end of every other task in life!

A concerning phenomenon I see around me is kids who don't even understand the nuances of a digital world are being hooked to it. Parents to have a greater ease in parenting are taking kids closer to devices (an attention magnet), and some kids refuse to even eat their food without having dopamine shots in the form of Youtube shorts. We are running Pavlov's experiment on the largest scale ever. When the attention span of such a nascent developing being itself is being brought down on average, I wonder if on the current path of evolution, this will be a step function decrease. 

Similar to how junk food becomes comfort food as the palette has to be satisfied and lazing around seems easy, even if it leads to a reduction in our health, parallelizing our attention to focus on the redundant incoming information or shorter content feels easier and more enjoyable. However, this helps in only comforting the mind to reduce our capability to attend to important information on a singular topic. As the solution to former lies in exercising our body and eating healthier, the latter can be solved by sandboxing our mind to focus on a single task without access to the outside world. 

Do we have to be Everywhere, and do Everything All At Once?