Filtering Attention

I’ve read a number of futuristic books in the last two years, as I’ve been trying to learn more about artificial intelligence and technology, and their potential impacts on education. It’s difficult to predict the future, which perhaps opens the doors to rife speculation. I am midway through Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable. He discusses a number of broad and inter-related trends that could take place within the next thirty years. Actually, he feels more strongly – he would say these should or will come to pass, hence the title of the book. They are inevitable.

Kelly writes very lucidly, and I think he’s on to something. I buy very few books. (Currently, I’m reading a copy of his book from my local library.) I would say it’s because I’m cheap. Why spend the money on a book I can easily access for free? And I might only read it once. Kelly might say that I’m part of the inexorable move towards sharing/renting and reducing the number of physical objects we own. The march of technology is making this inevitable. I do however purchase things that I think I might reuse. Kelly’s book is now on my list for my next bulk book purchase because I’d like to regularly refer back to his inevitable predictions. Every chapter I’ve read so far makes me stop and think. I’ve even stopped midway through a chapter several times just to mull the ideas in my head. It is rare for me to do this reading a “popular” book that seems breezy in its prose, as compared to a more dense academic treatise – where I’m forced to go slowly to make sure I understand what I’m reading.

I would like to highlight one of the recent chapters: Filtering. (All his chapter headings are one-word “trends”.) For perhaps the very first time in history, anyone with a decent internet connection, can potentially access the Library of Everything anytime. That’s a crazy thought. The entire world’s knowledge, ever-growing, and accessible to you in the blink of an eye. The architects of the ancient Library of Alexandria would be astounded. They thought their library was impressive (and it was at the time). It would attempt to house all the world’s knowledge in one place. Who would benefit? Those who lived close by and had access. Scholars from all over the world would come for such a trove. Egypt would be the wonder of the world.

Knowledge has since increased exponentially. (Whether wisdom has increased is a different story.) Storage and distribution, however, was complicated. The great libraries around the world carefully stored their treasured troves. Copies were made where possible, and increasingly so as the technology became available. But today, digital copies live in a distributed cloud. Destroying that knowledge would prove difficult – it’s not so easy to take down a SkyNet. The ancient Alexandrian library was not so lucky. All it took was a fire – and many precious manuscripts were destroyed, perhaps lost forever. Today, nothing gets lost, and may even return to haunt you. That is, if you or anyone else can find it.

The information explosion has led to the problem of finding what you are looking for. That is where Filtering comes in. With increasingly sophisticated filters, algorithms that can apply the filters speedily as they wormhole their way through the vast index of information will help you find what you seek. Who would have thought that proprietary algorithms would form the backbone of a billion (or perhaps trillion) dollar industry. (It’s all math!) But the algorithm makes choices. We can’t drink from the firehose. How do the best search engines try to filter out all the noise so they can give you exactly what you are looking for, in the shortest time possible, and in the fewest clicks? Because if your current search engine does not do this very well, you will move to another. It’s a cut-throat world out there for the algorithms too. What are the search engines and filters fighting for? Your attention.

Kelly writes: “From the human point of view, a filter focuses content. But seen in reverse, from the content point of view, a filter focuses human attention. The more content expands, the more focused that attention needs to become. […] Our attention is the only valuable resource we personally produce without training. It is in short supply and everyone wants some of it. You can stop sleeping altogether and you will still have only 24 hours per day of potential attention. […] The maximum potential attention is therefore fixed. Its production is inherently limited while everything else is becoming abundant. Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.”

The author follows this up by estimating advertising rates. Then he describes how AdSense works, which is both interesting and scary, and what the future landscape for the ad wars might look like. All this made me think of my students; joined at the hip to their mobile devices. They are being bombarded by attention seeking content, all the time. It is difficult to compete with well-targeted attention grabbers, which might be much more interesting than learning chemistry. It’s no wonder that many university faculty ban mobile device use in their classes. (I don’t.) At the moment, the majority of my students still pay attention and participate in class. But that may change. Even if I come up with better ways to engage the students and make my classes more interesting and more relevant, I might still eventually lose the battle for attention. That being said, I believe that deep down humans crave genuine unmediated relationships (even if they don’t always behave that way), and therefore there will always be a place for live interactions between teachers and students. I think it is still the best way to learn at a deep and long-lasting level, so such teaching-learning relationships will continue. My worry is that it will become the province of the economic elite.

If technology continues to drive the evolution of human attention, this suggest two potions that could be created (I’ve been thinking of examples for my upcoming class next semester – a potions for muggles course!) One would be a potion that eliminates the need for sleep without adverse physical effects – the ur-caffeine in a brew that tastes and smells even better than your present favorite coffee. The other would be a potion that packs in more sensing ability per unit time. That feeling you get when time slows down? (I’ve had it three times in my life, all just prior to potential road accidents.) Your adrenaline and other systems are kicking in. You’re taking in all this sensory information and it seems clear and lucid even though things are happening in a split second. There would be a market for the potion that would do that. It would be the scary new drug of choice – a dream for content marketers and those in the business of selling experiences rather than physical objects.

Experiences. That’s what the affluent increasingly want (or are willing) to pay for. Kelly thinks this is the last bastion of where the money might flow, because over time the cost of commodities in most any industry approaches zero asymptotically. Kelly writes: “Paradoxically, our attention to commodities is not worth much. Our monkey mind is cheaply hijacked. The remaining scarcity in an abundant society is the type of attention that is not derived or focused on commodities. The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences – which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditized and filterable.” Luxury entertainment, concert tickets, spending at restaurants, personal coaches, babysitting, home-visit health care; all these are going up in cost and price. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t worried about being out of a job. Since I’m good at my primary vocation, teaching, I can access the lucrative personal tutoring market. Chemistry, physics and math are in high demand. Students and/or their parents are willing to pay. (At the moment, I prefer to spend my free time doing other things instead of trying to make more money.)

The author also discusses issues that come up with filtering, such as opting to live in your own bubble or echo chamber. Just look at the polarized political landscape today, not just in the U.S., but in many other countries. There are ways, though, to broaden one’s landscape – in fact, there are algorithms that do so. Kelly ends the chapter on a positive note by viewing filtering as a route to self-actualization. I’m less sanguine about his conclusions. But it did make me think about how, in the pre-Internet world, choices were limited by constraints – and one could argue that our choices in life makes us who we are. In our brave new world, choices are filtered by algorithms, but ones that can be “trained” by us (and technology is moving towards filtering by personalization). It also made me think, as one who studies prebiotic chemistry, that the chemical evolution of life can be modeled as a large-scale complex filtering process. What were the chemical algorithms of those filters? Ah, a new idea to focus my attention!