47 seconds…

May I offer you a test today?  Odds are, you won’t pass.  (To be fair, maybe it’s my writing that will fail.)  On average, it will take 3.2 times the amount of typical attention span to read these 600 words. That’s 151 seconds.  If I were a betting man, I’d bet you won’t make it all the way through before clicking on another screen or app.  Ready?  GO! 

I read an article in the USA Today recently about our shortening attention spans.  Couple that with a Google search that suggests we, on average, read 238 words per minute and the clock is ticking before our urge to switch to something else. 

The article, citing research by Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California Irvine (that’s a mouthful!), suggests our online attention span has shortened to 47 seconds.  That’s 47 seconds!  Are you still paying attention?  I get it: 

My mind often wanders and sometimes leaves me altogether. 

Unknown Sage 

There’s much wild excitement these days about artificial intelligence.  ChatGBT is all the rage when it comes to writing things.  Pretty soon there will be a reading side to AI so machines can write to other machines that read while we humans sit on the sideline and… what?  If we’re no longer writing or reading I guess we’ll simply sit in front of our phone and watch pictures and videos of artificial entertainment fly by – every 47 seconds. 

I understand.  It’s hard to pay attention in “modern” times (and you already passed 47 seconds worth of reading time – still there?).  We face lots of distractions.  And asking someone to give you their “undivided attention” is a fantasy, true?  Based on personal experience, I certainly hope our medical surgeons are able to buck the attention span trend.  Although even in the operating theater machines are playing a larger role:

This phenomena of shortening attention spans was predicted long ago.  The shift of technology in the marketplace to “Cloud Computing” has enabled “more, better, faster” to an amazing degree.  Joe Weinman, when he was the Strategic Solutions Sales VP for AT&T Global Business Services (another mouthful!) in 2008 developed his “10 Laws of Cloudonomics”.  Here’s number eight: 

Cloudonomics Law #8: Dispersion is the inverse square of latency. 

Reduced latency — the delay between making a request and getting a response — is increasingly essential to delivering a range of services, among them rich Internet applications, online gaming, remote virtualized desktops, and interactive collaboration such as video conferencing. However, to cut latency in half requires not twice as many nodes, but four times. For example, growing from one service node to dozens can cut global latency (e.g., New York to Hong Kong) from 150 milliseconds to below 20. However, shaving the next 15 milliseconds requires a thousand more nodes.                                                           

OK. Looking for a machine now to help me understand the math.  But I get it (I think).  We all like things fast; the faster the better.  And we like things easy.  And we’d prefer them to be cheap.  Add those three elements up and what do we get?  Machines. 

AI doesn’t have the need for fast – they’re already fast.  Machines don’t worry about easy because, well, they’re machines.  As far as the money goes, people today seem to be willing to pay almost any amount of bit coins (aka artificial money) for fast and easy so long as it only takes 47 seconds. 

GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.