Is your attention being trained the same way an algorithm is trained?

In this micro, Carl Hayden Smith joins me to unpack what he calls the attention war: how algorithms and short-form media shape the brain toward ADHD-like patterns, whether you have ADHD or not. We also talk about what surfaces in the mind after a few phone-free days, and why Carl believes AI's real danger isn't sentience, but a mass hallucination of it: one that's already changing how we see ourselves.

Watch this MICRO on YouTube

This is a clip from 'Hyperhumanism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in the Age of AI | Carl Hayden Smith', Adventures Through The Mind Podcast, episode 198.

FULL EPISODE

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MORE AI & TECHNOLOGY EPISODES

• The Future of Visionary Art in an Era of AI ~ Psychedelic Café 11
• How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the Meta-Crisis | Alexander Beiner ~ ATTMind 185

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EPISODE TIMESTAMPS

• (00:00) Cold open: are screens training our brains toward ADHD?
• (00:45) McLuhan's "the medium is the message"
• (01:28) Is technology leading us, or are we leading it?
• (02:54) Losing wifi in Egypt, and realizing how addicted we are to data
• (03:37) "It is an attention war": algorithms harvesting consciousness
• (03:53) Gen Alpha, dumbphones, and phone-free tree apps
• (04:51) Will AI's fake-everything problem make us abandon screens?
• (05:56) Outsourcing cognition to AI, reclaiming the felt experience
• (06:31) Attention seeds consciousness: seeing the world through memes
• (07:45) "Designed to be like gambling machines"
• (08:10) A phone-free hike, and what surfaced in the mind that night
• (08:56) TV as "the opium of the masses," and a life review
• (10:50) Jaron Lanier: "AI won't destroy us, it will make us insane"
• (11:34) Machine learning vs. sentience: AI's "mass hallucination"
• (12:43) Should the machine be the artist, or should we keep that role?
• (13:21) Outro: about this clip and the full episode with Carl Hayden Smith