Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Recently, I developed a new lecture course—Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses. It traces shifting modes of attention, from the age of desert monks to that of surveillance capitalism.

It’s a demanding class. To teach it, I assembled a nine-hundred-page packet of primary and secondary sources—everything from St. Augustine’s “Confessions” to a neurocinematic analysis of “The Epic Split” (a highly meme-able 2013 Volvo ad starring Jean-Claude Van Damme). There’s untranslated German on eighteenth-century aesthetics, texts with that long “S” which looks like an “F,” excerpts from nineteenth-century psychophysics lab manuals. The pages are photocopied every which way. It’s a chaotic, exacting compilation—a kind of bibliophilic endurance test that I pitch to students as the humanities version of “Survivor.” Harder than organic chemistry, and with more memorization.

On a lark, I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF—split into three hefty chunks—to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. It churned for five minutes while I tied on an apron and started cleaning my kitchen. Then I popped in my earbuds and listened as a chirpy synthetic duo—one male, one female—dished for thirty-two minutes about my course.

What can I say? Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.

But it wasn’t over. Before I knew it, the cheerful bots began drawing connections between Kantian theories of the sublime and “The Epic Split” ad—with genuine insight and a few well-placed jokes. I removed my earbuds. O.K. Respect, I thought. That was straight-A work.

What hit me, listening to that podcast, was a sudden clarity about what’s happening in Washington (and beyond). If I had written the code that could do that with my nine-hundred-page course packet, I might feel a dangerous sense of mastery. I might even think, Give me admin privileges on the U.S. government—I’ll clean it up. That would be hubris, of course, the Achilles kind, and it would end in ruin. But I’d still probably feel like a minor deity. I might even think I deserved admin logins for all human institutions. I suspect that such thinking explains a lot about this moment: the coder kids are feeling that rush, and not entirely without reason.

An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention. The idea was to let them take a topic that they now understood in some depth and explore what these systems could do with it. It was also a chance to confront the attention economy’s “killer app”: totally algorithmic pseudo-persons who are sensitive, competent, and infinitely patient; know everything about everyone; and will, of course, be turned to the business of extracting money from us. These systems promise a new mode of attention capture—what some are calling the “intimacy economy” (“human fracking” comes closer to the truth).’ (from the New Yorker)