The fight for attention is real. In the attention driven economy, most businesses attempt to hack a piece of our attention – be it with a side add on the page you wanted to read, with a video add interrupting the video you actually wanted to watch, or with smart content on social media or other platforms, designed to make you buy something, rather than let you accomplish your goals.
What does it mean to use your devices well? Here at Wellbeing AI we believe our technology ought to support the human mind. Our minds have two modes of operating:
– an exploratory mode – when we are searching for new things and want to be led on new paths, meet new ideas, people and products; – when we want to be supported to EXPLORE.
– a focused mode – when we are attempting to accomplish our goals, and want to focus on the task at hand, only paying attention to the tools and content that is relevant for us to make progress.
Similarly, we believe cognitive AI technology ought to support these two modes, by providing:
– an exploratory function – for the times we want to be shown new things, and we want our horizons expanded;
– a focus function – for when we want to achieve something, or get something done.
Now, at Wellbeing AI we don’t believe that the focus function should always be on. There are definite advantages in enabling both functions, for human wellbeing and life satisfaction, as much as for work productivity and creativity. However, we believe that much of the mess we are currently in is due to technology missing the mark when it comes to providing these two functions.
In terms of focus, it is pretty clear how our technology is failing us: constantly presenting us fun content to interact with, that drives us on other paths than the things we wanted to achieve, or interrupts our focus efforts and wastes our time, requiring us to then refocus and making us feel inefficient and like we are not accomplishing much, after we have to come back to the same task 4-5 times without having made much progress (that is the very definition of “not rewarding”, which makes distracting rewards in the virtual space or social media even more exciting.
This fun content is sometimes benign (very entertaining apps or posts, designed to constantly engage with us, not to let us fulfil our goals), and at other times focuses on driving our attention to some product or business so that some tiny share of our financial resources is also directed towards one business or another.
In terms of exploration, one would think that our technology is definitely supportive: we get to discover very many products, people, businesses, and places to go to. However, this is also debatable, depending on whether the exploration our technology provides for us is biased or not, and is truly free in terms of allowing new opinions or types of products to reach us, or designed to keep us in some political opinion silo, eco chamber, or reinforce our consumer profile.
Putting the exploration part aside for another blogpost, what about our messy focus? Could new tech, specifically AI, make any of this better?
The answer is, of course, depends on how it is designed, and what purposes it serves.
Let’s take our minds for example. Your brain does not present to you information in a way that is unbiased, unfiltered and detached from your goals. However, it also comes equipped with this wonderful GOAL DRIVEN ability, which makes us always see with more prominence the things that are important to us.
If we set a goal to enter in a loving relationship, we will all of a sudden “see” many more people and consider them from this perspective. If we consider buying a car, we will all of a sudden notice many more of the cars on the street, and find ourselves engaging with our friends on topics related to car ownership, and their experience with it. If we want to achieve a work goal, our mind will start offering potential solutions, action steps, we will see the books related to our goal in a library, and in the wild. This goes about all sorts of goals. If you are passionate about fonts, you will notice street signage, web page fonts, and even the handwriting font traits of your colleague’s notes.
So how would AI look like that aims at clearing up the digital mess that wants to happily come your way every day? Wait, you will say, I have seen automation like that before – my email has a spam killer, and this helps, but it is just a drop in the ocean. I still have to go through dozens of emails a day that are unimportant to me, to get to the one that is interesting.
Indeed, various approaches have been proposed to cater to your digital wellbeing, and to maintain your capacity for attention. Some of these require disabling notifications, putting our phone away, or playing with a variety of apps that show you your online actions so that you get to grips with your habits and attempt to control them. However, what all these approaches do is they put the responsibility of protecting your attention on you – because most of these attention consuming systems are OPT-OUT, not OPT-IN (in fact some are very hard to opt out anyway!). You are, in fact, fighting automation that has been researched and built specifically to entrance you, and keep you in its grip. For you, it takes effort shutting down all those notifications, or checking your habits online, with tools that need enabling, and keeping yourself disciplined. For automation, it takes no effort to add you to yet another email list, enable notifications and ads as soon as you have downloaded an app. You are fighting automation with human effort, and limited human time, when automation should instead support you.
So how about something much more radical than that? How about AI that actually CARES about your attention (and I don’t mean in a conscious way, just in its actions). AI that DEFENDS your attention and works hard to keep YOU on YOUR GOALS?
How about AI you can inform of email you may be waiting for, that will not bother you for anything else?
Such AI would be an extension of your GOAL DRIVEN system, and select information based on your goals. You would inform it of your goals, and it will calculate which sources are really relevant to you, showing you, when you are in FOCUS mode, only things relevant to your goals – be it on the web or on your computer.
Such AI would let you know when it believes you have drifted off topic – asking you if you want to come back, or you would like to take a break. It would learn your working style – how often do you need breaks, and after what types of activities? How are you inspired? Does spending time looking at Instagram photos seem to provide you with a productivity boost and new ideas? Do you like to get your content in written form, as research articles, as numbers, as infographics?
But most importantly, an Attention Concierge AI would be your ALLY. It will sift through information with your goals in mind, and do its damnedest to defend them.
So what do you think of AI like this? Do you have ideas of how it could look like, and how it could help you?
Would you like to build it with us, or help getting it built?
Comment here, or send us your thoughts on the topic.
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Author: Dr. Dr. Ana-Maria Olteteanu