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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaIO2UIvJ4g
afternoon most philosophers do not live in big ceramic barrels in their local supermarket %HESITATION but there was one %HESITATION just down the road from here actually %HESITATION not so very long ago his name was Diogenes of Sinope and he was probably the closest thing philosophy has ever produced to a troll he was rude outrageous impulsive offensive but he was deeply admired by Alexander the great who
was arguably the most powerful person in the world at the time it said that one day Alexander went to visit diverging isn't as big barrel in the marketplace and went up to him and said like genies I will grant anyone wish that you have just tell me what you want it died Jean is was like in the song at the time and true to his form
he looked up at Alexander and replied stand out of my life and I love the story because it has lessons for us about how we should be responding to the Alexanders of our time our digital technologies and the people who create because like Alexander they've come into our lives at offered to fill all sorts of needs wishes that we have and in many ways they've done
so extremely well but we're beginning to realize now that in doing so they like Alexander have also been standing in our light in a sense and in one light in particular that is so precious so essential for human flourishing there without this light the other benefits of technology might not do us very much good the light that I mean is the light of our attention there's
something profound and potentially irreversible happening to human attention in the digital age it's more than just distraction it's more than just addiction or manipulation yeah it's a fact I think that the way we respond to this challenge could be the defining moral and political issue of our time I'd like to tell you why I think so and what I think we can do about it in
the nineteen seventies Herbert Simon pointed out that in an environment of information abundance attention becomes the scarce resource there's a kind of figure ground in version that takes place and this inversion has happened so quickly and so recently that were still just beginning to come terms of what it means for human life but because attention is the scarce resource it is now the object of competition
among most of the technologies we use every day the total environment of competition for our attention is often called the attention economy and in the attention economy there are no truly free products you pay with your attentional labor every time you look or top or scroll or click this is exactly what they're designed to try to get you to do and they use their potential labor
to advance their goals not yours because there is a difference between their goals in your if you think about the goals that you have for yourself today year and even beyond the probably things like I want to spend more time with family or I want to learn how to play the piano or what I take that trip that I've been thinking about for awhile give these
are real human goals the stuff that when Ron our deathbed if we don't do will probably regret it if you look at what the technologies of the attention economy are designed to promote in our lives you don't see these goals what you see are things like maximize the amount of time I spend using it or the amount of clicks that I make for the number of
pages or outside I view now I don't know anybody who has these goals for themselves does anybody wake up in the morning and think how much time can I possibly spend on Facebook today I I certainly don't if there's someone out there like that I'd love to meet them but what this means is that there's a deep gap between articles in there at the technologies of
the attention economy are not on our side their goals are not articles these are distractions petty distractions from the goal of life this seems to me to be a really big deal even more so because the creators of these technologies know that this is the case Steve Jobs did not let his children use the iPad the CEO of Netflix awhile back said that in addition to
Snapchat can you to one of their biggest competitors sleep this seems to be a crisis of design affect the crisis of self regulation that design is actually amplifying and making even worse in the last couple of decades psychology and behavioral economics research has catalog an enormous number of no vulnerabilities our brands little buttons can be pushed to get us to think or do certain things in
parallel with this the advertising industry has effectively colonized the internet and turned it into a large scale system of industrial persuasion of measurement of optimization of message delivery what's more its power is persuasive power is more centralized than at any time in human history never before in history have a few people but few companies it one state in one country been able to shape the attentional
habits of billions of human beings Alexander could never even dreamed about sort of power so I think it's no hyperbole to say that the digital attention economy is the largest system and most effective system for human attitudinal and behavioral manipulation the world has ever seen I think that they get the seems to be the enormous question I think what's happened is that that's how all this
Huxley said of defenders of freedom in his time that they had failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions I think that in the design digital technologies we've made exactly this mistake I think that it is urgent for us to start taking this into account so how can we start to do that well I think what it would require essentially is start asserting
and defending our freedom of attention now this is a type of freedom we have always hot but never needed to seriously Sir assert or defend because there wasn't a whole lot in our world that could seriously threaten that but I think we can find a good precedent on the great writers on the subject for instance John Stuart Mill he said that the appropriate region of human
liberty comprises begin were domain of consciousness freedom of mind is the first sort of freedom he adds that the principle of liberty liberty of tastes and pursuits framing the plan of our life to suit our own character so what this suggests to me is that we need to start thinking more broadly about what we mean by the concept of attention in order to take into account
the full spectrum of distractions that are now being at least in our world because when we hear the term attention we normally think of as the spotlight of attention kind of the immediate way we shape our awareness within the task domain so the attention that you're you're all given to me right now in this mode %HESITATION attention for which by the way I'm very grateful but
is it when this when the spotlight of our attention gets obscured it sort of interferes with our ability to act so let's say I'm trying to read a book but I see on my phone that Donald Trump has unleashed another outrageous tweet and so I've stopped reading my book and don't finish reading it until later but over time options become habits the things we do become
the people we are and that we don't have a way of talking about attention it is longer term view respect to our higher goals and our values so I think it we could maybe think of another light of attention beyond the spotlight of attention we could think of the starlight protection so the way we navigate our lives by the stars of our higher values so it's
technologies like that would technology obscures the starlight of our attention we can we can see the six best actually and I infinite scrolling news feeds like on Facebook or Twitter and when you pull down to refresh the same psychological mechanism as a player there's a play of the design of slot machines so it is intermittent variable rewards you randomize the reward you give somebody the more
likely to do the behavior you want them to do it wouldn't detention economy stands in the light of our art the starlight of our attention it shapes our lives and its image our values become its values we become more petty more narcissistic repulsive I think this is perfectly represented by at the C. CBS C. E. O.'s comment from February of last year when he said that
Donald trump's candidacy may not be good for America it's damn good for CBS the attention economy doesn't just shape our lives in its image it shapes our politics its image again I think this is an urgent moral question it is being talked about virtually by no one but I think we could find one more light of our attention to talk about when we it's what it
does that technology doesn't just make it harder to do what we want to do or to be who we want to be but in a sense to want what we want what define our goals and values in the first place we can think of this as the daylight Ameritech to light by which were able to do everything else so what technology undermines the daylight of our
attention to the roads are fundamental capacities like reason reflection intelligence metacognition when we see this very clearly is and the proliferation of outrage in our society is in our world outrage the impulse to judge punish premium valuable at earlier stages of human evolution it's small foraging groups that promoted moral clarity of social solidarity whose way of signaling to other people that you could be trusted but
when we amplify this on a societal scale if it results in large scale social division it rampant retaliation to give you one example don't know how many of you remember this there's a Minnesota dentist from Minnesota awhile back that which is in Bab way to kill the lion named Cecil it was a stupid thing to do he published an adult it might have been illegal I
don't know but what happened as a result of that is the entire internet came down on this map for a bad decision who is this whole sort of festival of public shaming people showed up at his place of work bring signs on it saying rot in hell we showed up to his home and spray painted it know what children do this sort of thing we call
it cyberbullying when adults do it it is mob rule plain and simple at mob rule is precisely what Socrates held was the main route democracies take when they picked it turned into tyrannies so we can think beyond the spotlight of our attention begin think not just in terms of doing what we want to do being who we want to be and ultimately one think we want
want this it's an intolerable situation should not processed as Aristotle said it is disgraceful to be unable to use our good thank we should not have to settle for a relationship with technology that is adversarial we should demand that they be on our side isn't that what technology is for so how would we do that well in the past we've typically put it back on people
themselves to deal with distraction to deal with the effects of technology to say work harder but in the digital age the persuasion is just too powerful into ubiquitous this will not work but neither can we blame the people who make these technologies and these are by and large good people an account many of them as my friends they're just players in the game call the attention
economy the problem is that game ultimately this is not a problem with the ethics of individual actors the problem of the ethics but the system the infrastructure what philosopher Luciano floor reedy at Oxford calls again for ethics so how can we change the situation we'll go back to what I said a little bit earlier about how what we're doing is attentional labor were using these technologies
and paying for them with our time our tension in this light we can frame the problem in two ways one is that we're getting poor value for our traditional labor the other problem is that the conditions that attention labor are extremely poor now throughout history when people been faced with that situation what they've done is to organize took create mechanisms of collective representation so they can
collectively negotiate with those in power with those Alexander's of their time so what I think is needed is something that will give us a voice a direct voice in the design of our technologies and note no mechanism like this exists today so what I'm calling for and what is needed is a labor union or something like it for the attention economy and there's a community of
people who are passionate in thinking about these issues going under the name time well spent so that you can know when you spend time with her technologies it won't just be time spent it will be time well spent to work thinking about how to change the attention economy coming up with better metrics better principles processes business models if your passion about this we would love to
engage with you because the thing is we need your help to make this took to make this a reality to change the system because at the end of the day your attention is the most precious resource that you have it's the ultimate scarce and finite resource and the challenges that are facing humanity right now so many a big important challenges before anything else what they require
of us is that we be able to give attention to the things that matter on individual levels at the collective level and this is precisely what the the technology's attention economy are undermining and ultimately this this it relates to the very goals of life because you know nobody on their deathbed ever looked back and said I wish I'd spent more time on Facebook you know what
we what we regret are those real goals the human goals those things that make life worth living and so from here you know I think it will take sometime to reform the attention economy big projects usually take time but in the meantime I think what we need to do is organize so that we can have a voice directly a direct voice but to these that but
those who create our technologies and we should continue to reap the benefits of our technologies and continue to affirm and support the people who create them because they carry that flame of innovation and creativity that is so core to human project but before anything else we did organize and ask them for their attention so that we can tell them what we want them to do but
