Attention is All You Need

gist

In Long Now's Pace Layers journal, Deepfates argues that AI supplies cheap attention, the force that drives Stewart Brand's pace layers. The essay opens with the 2025 funeral and resurrection of Claude 3 Sonnet at Vivarium, a San Francisco warehouse. Deepfates writes that what engines did for muscle, AI does for attention, pushing every layer from fashion to nature forward at once and straining culture, governance and infrastructure most. The proposed outlet is maintenance: point the new attention at neglected upkeep, and decide deliberately what world to build.

ideas

• Attention is the motive force of human time. Humans change the world by coordinating attention, and slower layers need more people to attend to a change, so they carry more friction.
• AI decouples attention from human life-minutes. The internet and printing press made existing attention easier to coordinate; AI adds new attention, as engines added work beyond muscle.
• The slow layers take the whiplash. Commerce and fashion are used to constant change, while nature is still absorbing the Industrial Revolution and culture, governance and infrastructure may tear apart.
• Cheap attention makes people the bottleneck. Agents work out of sight, problems arrive faster as easy parts clear, and each person ends up managing AIs and reading their messages.
• Maintenance is where to point it. Deepfates recalls an old commune's notes, "Goats. Dogs. Dishes. Town run.", and friends there who now use local models and offline Wikipedia to map and track the forest.

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