Synthetic attention

“Synthetic attention” is one of those undercurrents of the digital economy that is about to become a tidal wave — engulfing our metrics and measurement systems.

On the fraudulent end of this spectrum, click farms and engagement mills have been the early warning signs. These sophisticated networks have already proven how economic value can be produced and derived from automated agents — especially when so much of the influence and credibility online depends on gauging and monetizing attention.

But on the other side of this, AI summaries and executive briefings already point the way to a regime where most digital information is either produced or consumed by robots before it reaches our human senses. If you subscribe to hundreds of great newsletters, or podcasts, or people, having an AI assistant go through all of the daily output and identify key topics for you is already a major evolution of synthetic attention.

Digesting, analyzing, and reflecting on large bodies of information is one of the emerging capabilities of our robot companions. From that perspective, you can start to see how the contemporary abundance of media will be managed and rendered useful to us time-constrained human beings.

Attention is worthless and superficial because it’s only the first step in a long, fast, and probably automated, process of filtering, classifying, and summarizing.

What you really want is the trust, dialogue, and connection that develop — slowly — with genuine human interaction.