aimilios
Over the last two decades, the internet brought the world's information to our fingertips. But our attention didn't scale with it.
There is always something new to read, react to, respond to, learn about, etc.
We’ve accepted the consequences of this as “hard facts” of modern life:
Missed Opportunities
a. Due to the volume of information available exceeding what we can process. Things inevitably fall through the cracks: we don’t hear about a new direct competitor, or learn about an important grant after its deadline has passed.
Information Overload, that creates a trade-off between:
a. Scrolling, and spending our attention -- at the cost of our mental wellbeing and clarity -- and still barely scratching the surface of the iceberg.
b. FOMO -- we can choose to disconnect but accept feeling behind and potentially missing critical opportunities/knowledge.Random Luck
a. We hear about some research critical to our work because a friend randomly stumbled on it and forwarded it on iMessage.
What can we do about it?
Our information diet is only as good as the sources that feed us. And they have some limitations -- for instance:
- Social feeds: are misaligned -- they optimize for more clicks, and their only context on us is previous clicks.
- Search/answer engines: bottlenecked by our time & ability to know what questions to ask.
- Newsletters/RSS: are not personalized.
- Friends/Family: have great context & provide high quality info, but bottlenecked by their own attention.
AI is part of the problem, but I believe it offers a clear solution. If you’ve seen Jarvis in Iron Man or Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator, you’ve seen an early sketch of it: a personal information concierge that brings only what matters to your attention.
Such a concierge does not exist yet but will be able to:
- Deeply understand our context, goals, preferences, feedback - and reason about it to determine what is worth our time
- Proactively consume information so we don’t have to
- Scroll our feeds
- Listen to all episodes from our favorite podcasts
- Read our emails, messages, and newsletters
- Monitor the web for us
- Predict searches we may want to make and check if their results are useful to us
- Proactively research topics we are interested in for new developments
- Etc
- Manage its interactions with us to preserve attention, knowing when to interrupt us and when to batch for later
- Remember what we already know and what it has shared, to ensure information stays novel
In other words: it will multiply our attention.
Final thoughts
For the first time, we might have an escape hatch from the attention economy. I've built a few prototypes in this space before -- enough to see that some people genuinely want this and are even willing to pay for better solutions. If this problem resonates with you too, I'd love to chat.