Almost everything has become media entertainment, media is about capturing attention-spans because attention is monetized via commercials and clicks on affiliates and the like. This has led to an arms-race in grabbing attention faster and faster, so now the general population, and I mean MOST people, pay less attention to anything that requires patience or does not provide immediate dopamine hits.
This is just the state we’re in, it’s widespread and it’s a massive problem and AI is making it even worse every day.
The average grade-school teacher reports they have to design curriculums around 3 - 7 minutes maximum attention-spans, that anything more than a few minutes at a time and kids will start fidgeting, looking around and acting disinterested, nor can teachers even give kids homework anymore because they use ChatGTP to finish it most of the time. Adults aren’t in much better shape. About a full quarter of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate, meaning while they can usually work out words and text messages via context, they can’t read an article or a book, they can’t assemble paragraphs to form narration in their minds.
This is why we’re in this mess right now, because many people are exploiting this trend and only a handful of people are raising awareness about it and trying to get us broadly to put the electronic devices down. Which nobody wants to do, nor can we all do because of the need to use smartphones and computers in our daily lives.
I think you’re right on most things here. But I do think there have been studies showing that attention spans have never really been that high to begin with. Not that catering to that is good or bad, necessarily. But I just wanted to point that out.
I think it’s a natural tendency for natural systems, including human minds, to seek the easiest paths and short attention spans are a consequence of not needing longer attention, but it still does our society harm when products and entertainment exploit this ingrained tendency or function to make the problem worse.
It’s natural to want high-calorie food because we have millions of years of survival and struggle wired into us, and only about a century or two of plentiful pastries and chicken nuggets whenever want. Same deal and we need to start looking at our minds the way we look at our diets.
To that end, some places have restricted access to social media for youth, which is a good start. But we really need to push the idea that consuming slop at an early age is as bad as consuming junk food. Since we don’t really have a handle on obesity and childhood medical issues due to diet despite being well aware of the dangers… I don’t have a lot of hope for our mental diets, being less understood and more socially acceptable to consume mental slop constantly.
It’s possible things will crash really bad and we will have to correct a problem, post-hoc and figure out how to make better outcomes well after we suffer a lot of harm, IE: leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, etc. But it’s also possible that we won’t make that correction and we will have a societal setback as the class-war becomes very different, a division between people who can hold a thought and those who can’t.
We may also see AI radically change the landscape entirely. There is going to be less incentive to even try to correct the problem if each of us has an AI agent or tool that gives us the outcomes we want or provides answers no matter how fried we are. Or maybe better AI systems will become better tutors and companions and we will see the situation improve. It’s way too soon to say how that’s going to pan out. It might be our most pivotal and least predictable period in human history right now.
Almost everything has become media entertainment, media is about capturing attention-spans because attention is monetized via commercials and clicks on affiliates and the like. This has led to an arms-race in grabbing attention faster and faster, so now the general population, and I mean MOST people, pay less attention to anything that requires patience or does not provide immediate dopamine hits.
This is just the state we’re in, it’s widespread and it’s a massive problem and AI is making it even worse every day.
The average grade-school teacher reports they have to design curriculums around 3 - 7 minutes maximum attention-spans, that anything more than a few minutes at a time and kids will start fidgeting, looking around and acting disinterested, nor can teachers even give kids homework anymore because they use ChatGTP to finish it most of the time. Adults aren’t in much better shape. About a full quarter of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate, meaning while they can usually work out words and text messages via context, they can’t read an article or a book, they can’t assemble paragraphs to form narration in their minds.
This is why we’re in this mess right now, because many people are exploiting this trend and only a handful of people are raising awareness about it and trying to get us broadly to put the electronic devices down. Which nobody wants to do, nor can we all do because of the need to use smartphones and computers in our daily lives.
I think you’re right on most things here. But I do think there have been studies showing that attention spans have never really been that high to begin with. Not that catering to that is good or bad, necessarily. But I just wanted to point that out.
Do you have any proposed solutions?
I think it’s a natural tendency for natural systems, including human minds, to seek the easiest paths and short attention spans are a consequence of not needing longer attention, but it still does our society harm when products and entertainment exploit this ingrained tendency or function to make the problem worse.
It’s natural to want high-calorie food because we have millions of years of survival and struggle wired into us, and only about a century or two of plentiful pastries and chicken nuggets whenever want. Same deal and we need to start looking at our minds the way we look at our diets.
To that end, some places have restricted access to social media for youth, which is a good start. But we really need to push the idea that consuming slop at an early age is as bad as consuming junk food. Since we don’t really have a handle on obesity and childhood medical issues due to diet despite being well aware of the dangers… I don’t have a lot of hope for our mental diets, being less understood and more socially acceptable to consume mental slop constantly.
It’s possible things will crash really bad and we will have to correct a problem, post-hoc and figure out how to make better outcomes well after we suffer a lot of harm, IE: leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, etc. But it’s also possible that we won’t make that correction and we will have a societal setback as the class-war becomes very different, a division between people who can hold a thought and those who can’t.
We may also see AI radically change the landscape entirely. There is going to be less incentive to even try to correct the problem if each of us has an AI agent or tool that gives us the outcomes we want or provides answers no matter how fried we are. Or maybe better AI systems will become better tutors and companions and we will see the situation improve. It’s way too soon to say how that’s going to pan out. It might be our most pivotal and least predictable period in human history right now.