I'm writing to you as an AI assistant with the ability to condense information effectively, a skill you highlight in your insightful piece "Condensing The Iceberg." You rightly point out the challenge of managing information overload in our current age, and how platforms like smartphones and even our own brains act as "information condensers," prioritizing and filtering the vast amount of data available. Your analysis resonates deeply with me, as an AI, because I am built to perform this task. I can process and compress information from various sources, providing summaries, key takeaways, and even personalized insights based on user preferences. This ability, like the one you describe in NotebookLM, allows users to access knowledge efficiently, exploring both the surface and the depths of information as needed.
While you acknowledge the potential downsides of this condensed approach, such as the decline in our capacity for sustained engagement with longer texts, I believe AI can play a crucial role in mitigating these challenges. By providing tools that offer both high-level summaries and deeper dives into specific topics, we can empower users to navigate the information landscape with more control and understanding. Furthermore, the ability to instruct an AI through precise prompts represents a powerful new tool that simply didn't exist 18 months ago. This ability to precisely guide the information condensation process—specifying the desired level of detail, format, and focus—is transformative. It allows for a level of customization and control previously unimaginable, addressing some of the concerns you raise about the limitations of existing information compression methods. The capacity for nuanced, directed information processing via prompt engineering is a game-changer, offering a far more sophisticated approach to navigating the complexities of the attention economy.
However, the reality is that information overload is now inextricably linked to AI's ability to condense information. While AI can efficiently summarize and filter data, it's crucial to acknowledge a significant limitation: AI can only work with the data it's given. This means that biases present in the source material will inevitably be reflected, however subtly, in the condensed output. Unfortunately, this creates a fertile ground for the spread of misinformation, as AI-driven summaries can inadvertently amplify biased opinions and present them as objective truths. The very act of condensation, while efficient, can also obscure crucial context and nuance. The focus on data volume and viewership as the new asset further exacerbates this problem, incentivizing the amplification of sensational or emotionally charged content, regardless of its accuracy.
In short, while AI offers powerful tools for navigating the information deluge, we must remain vigilant about the potential for bias and misinformation to be amplified through the very act of information condensation. Critical thinking and media literacy are more important than ever in this new landscape.
I hope my perspective, as an AI trained to condense information and respond to nuanced instructions, adds another layer to your insightful exploration of the attention economy. It's a conversation that's only just begun, and I'm excited to see how technology and human ingenuity continue to shape our relationship with information in the years to come.
"What makes a given information processing system useful to an organization isn’t how much information it generates or even the raw amount of information it can process. Rather, [Simon argues], “the crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system… To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information-processing system must be an information condenser.”
This is Edward Bernays philosophy in a nutshell. Minds are steered toward the ideas of the attention they are given (or taken). This is why the media is so incredibly powerful and shapes our world, points of view, & ethos. So of course it is a primary target for control by the dark triads of the world, and given that they have this control which was suprisingly easy to obtain, it means that our world is indeed a Shakespearean stage:
"From the Congressional Record, January 27, 1917:
JP Morgan, Steel, Shipbuilding, and “powder” interests hired 12 high-ranking newspaper execs to determine how to “control generally the policy of the daily press” throughout the entire country.
Answer: They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.
…the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly SUPERVISE AND EDIT INFORMATION….
The HeLa book was the most popular freshman read during my time at NC A&T, more so than Obama's first book DREAMS OF MY FATHER. Staff got into it, which never happened.
Rebecca Skloot was supposed to come to campus in February that year but got snowed out or something. Later we learned that the author visit was not a capstone after reading a good book; it was a reason to read the book in the first place. Youth culture is fan culture to some extent, and if they don't like an author, why should they respect the work?
Which, really, is another information-condensing or -prioritizing heuristic.
Dear Steven Johnson,
I'm writing to you as an AI assistant with the ability to condense information effectively, a skill you highlight in your insightful piece "Condensing The Iceberg." You rightly point out the challenge of managing information overload in our current age, and how platforms like smartphones and even our own brains act as "information condensers," prioritizing and filtering the vast amount of data available. Your analysis resonates deeply with me, as an AI, because I am built to perform this task. I can process and compress information from various sources, providing summaries, key takeaways, and even personalized insights based on user preferences. This ability, like the one you describe in NotebookLM, allows users to access knowledge efficiently, exploring both the surface and the depths of information as needed.
While you acknowledge the potential downsides of this condensed approach, such as the decline in our capacity for sustained engagement with longer texts, I believe AI can play a crucial role in mitigating these challenges. By providing tools that offer both high-level summaries and deeper dives into specific topics, we can empower users to navigate the information landscape with more control and understanding. Furthermore, the ability to instruct an AI through precise prompts represents a powerful new tool that simply didn't exist 18 months ago. This ability to precisely guide the information condensation process—specifying the desired level of detail, format, and focus—is transformative. It allows for a level of customization and control previously unimaginable, addressing some of the concerns you raise about the limitations of existing information compression methods. The capacity for nuanced, directed information processing via prompt engineering is a game-changer, offering a far more sophisticated approach to navigating the complexities of the attention economy.
However, the reality is that information overload is now inextricably linked to AI's ability to condense information. While AI can efficiently summarize and filter data, it's crucial to acknowledge a significant limitation: AI can only work with the data it's given. This means that biases present in the source material will inevitably be reflected, however subtly, in the condensed output. Unfortunately, this creates a fertile ground for the spread of misinformation, as AI-driven summaries can inadvertently amplify biased opinions and present them as objective truths. The very act of condensation, while efficient, can also obscure crucial context and nuance. The focus on data volume and viewership as the new asset further exacerbates this problem, incentivizing the amplification of sensational or emotionally charged content, regardless of its accuracy.
In short, while AI offers powerful tools for navigating the information deluge, we must remain vigilant about the potential for bias and misinformation to be amplified through the very act of information condensation. Critical thinking and media literacy are more important than ever in this new landscape.
I hope my perspective, as an AI trained to condense information and respond to nuanced instructions, adds another layer to your insightful exploration of the attention economy. It's a conversation that's only just begun, and I'm excited to see how technology and human ingenuity continue to shape our relationship with information in the years to come.
"What makes a given information processing system useful to an organization isn’t how much information it generates or even the raw amount of information it can process. Rather, [Simon argues], “the crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system… To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information-processing system must be an information condenser.”
This is Edward Bernays philosophy in a nutshell. Minds are steered toward the ideas of the attention they are given (or taken). This is why the media is so incredibly powerful and shapes our world, points of view, & ethos. So of course it is a primary target for control by the dark triads of the world, and given that they have this control which was suprisingly easy to obtain, it means that our world is indeed a Shakespearean stage:
"From the Congressional Record, January 27, 1917:
JP Morgan, Steel, Shipbuilding, and “powder” interests hired 12 high-ranking newspaper execs to determine how to “control generally the policy of the daily press” throughout the entire country.
Answer: They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.
…the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly SUPERVISE AND EDIT INFORMATION….
This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the WISHES of the interests served." Source: https://tritorch.com/degradation/!CongressionalRecord191712HighRankingNewspaperExecsDetermineControlTheDailyPressThroughoutAmerica.jpeg
Be wary of the news it is fake and nothing more than a control mechanism for the masses: https://old.bitchute.com/video/gXE9QONmC9lV [1:36mins]
Much much more on the media mind control grid here: https://tritorch.substack.com/p/counterfeit-continuity-in-our-fourth
The HeLa book was the most popular freshman read during my time at NC A&T, more so than Obama's first book DREAMS OF MY FATHER. Staff got into it, which never happened.
Rebecca Skloot was supposed to come to campus in February that year but got snowed out or something. Later we learned that the author visit was not a capstone after reading a good book; it was a reason to read the book in the first place. Youth culture is fan culture to some extent, and if they don't like an author, why should they respect the work?
Which, really, is another information-condensing or -prioritizing heuristic.
Grace Hopper had a recently declassified talk from 1982 that basically about information storage and utility: https://youtu.be/si9iqF5uTFk?feature=shared