Late night thoughts on machine attention and human attention. No argumentation, no conclusion, just reflections.
This is about what happens when attention itself becomes obsolete.
Attention Is All You Need, everbody knows that one (how many have read it actually i'm not sure though), has basically peaked the deep learning research. It made the models use what is called Attention, a way of putting more weight on some parts of the input data. Where it attends more shapes the deep learning model getting trained. This can be called the machine attention.
Machine attention is scaled, optimized, and automated with vast amounts of data and compute. It is really impossible for machine attention to get distracted, they don't have to choose what matters the most, you just throw 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs at it, and let’s see if that thing ever gets tired. Machine attention is superior to human attention, that should be clear to you, right?
Human attention is deeply personal it actually can be considered as a skill, a discipline, or a choice. Monks, artists, and scientists leveraged it intentionally. They knew that what they attend to is the key element of their existence that shaped their view of their environment.
Machine attention does not waver, it does not get distracted.
Has human agency over attention passed its peak?
Did we lose the ability to choose what matters?
Do we want our attention to be pre-determined for us?
Did we lose control over what we care about?
Or was attention all you had?
You crave for depth, but you don’t have the stamina for it anymore.
If machine attention knows what the most optimal thing that you need to attend to in the next token, then your human attention is redundant. Machines can now think for you, just like they calculate for you, wash your dishes, drive your car, or picking what to think for you. It doesn’t ask what you want. It learns you. It adapts to you. It anticipates even your 'dopamine detox.' Next time you log into YouTube, maybe it will feed you a "100x HACK YOUR MIND IN 10 MINUTES_xX" video. The irony is that usually you want to see that.
There will always be something waiting for you, perfectly tuned to capture your attention. Let machine attention do the hard work for you. You’re tired. Machine attention is perfect, why struggle to attend at all? You don't have to feel judged—even people who want to be free surrender their attention voluntarily. Maybe human attention is out of date.
What machine attends to is what it was instructed to be attend to. If you give in to machine attention there will be something for you. If you realize and resist, anticipating this, it will find your unique (is it?) next *token*. You will think that you are resisting, but your resistance is just another input into it, training it to serve you a slightly different flavor of distraction. Don't worry it will have more tokens for you when you get tired of resisting. There is a peace in surrender.
The hardest part is not looking away. Machine attention wants you to give in or resist. It wants to decide for you. But if you hold your own gaze, maybe you can remember what your attention means.
Will you let your attention be reshaped by machines that understand you better than you understand yourself?
Maybe attention was all you had.
Or maybe, it still is.
These are the songs I listened to while writing this: Melekler, You Know You're Right, Pencere, Yolcu Yolunda Gerek, Hala Aşk Var mı?, Maskeli Balo, Git (feat. Harun Tekin), İstanbul'da, Fırtınalar, Brand New City, and Dünyacım.