President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have mastered “attentional dominance,” Chris Hayes told fellow MSNBC host Ali Velshi on Sunday — and the rest of us just have to figure out how to cope with that.
“What we’ve seen at the level of public discourse is a total breakdown of attentional regimes,” Hayes explained. “And what it means is that people that are just good at getting attention in and of itself — Donald trump’s appalling spectacle in the Oval Office the other day, Elon Musk with the platform he purchased — they’ve achieved this kind of attentional dominance in this environment.”
His apparent solution for everyone else is that what we “have to do is to kind of pull back and choose what we are focusing on.”
Hayes is the author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” In an interview with Slate’s “What’s Next” podcast on Feb. 16, he spoke about the relationship between AI and infinite scroll on smartphones and compared it to a slot machine.
“I also posit that it feels like a slot machine for non-accidental reasons. The slot machine is probably the single most successful pure attention-monetizing technology ever derived. People can spend eight hours there with these little five-second bursts,” he explained.
The infinite scroll, in turn, feeds the machine, which has an apparently limitless capacity for information. The algorithm, Hayes further noted, is where AI as we currently understand it was “first deployed truly at scale” in a “customer-facing way.” In other words, he added, “What the social media algorithm is doing is just machine learning at scale.”
You can watch the interview between Chris Hayes and Ali Velshi in the video, above.
