MCSI Lecture Series Presents Carlos Montemayor

Lecture: "Cultivating Attention in the Era of AI"

This entry in the Munroe Center for Social Inquiry's lecture series, "Cultivating Attention," asks how we can bridge the seemingly incompatible approaches to understanding attention emerging from artificial intelligence research and political philosophy.

Research on attention is becoming relevant for discussions on artificial intelligence and political philosophy. With respect to artificial intelligence, the thesis that a capacity similar to attention is crucial for contextualizing information intelligently has gained momentum. In political theory, the attention economy has triggered an interdisciplinary investigation into the sources of our addiction to social media and of our loneliness crisis. These two research programs are at odds. The “automatized” understanding of our attention, as part of our general intelligence, is part of the problem that the political approach to attention is trying to criticize and challenge. In this talk, I propose a framework to bridge these two incompatible research programs, offering solutions that may ameliorate the problems associated with our contemporary attention crisis.

Carlos Montemayor is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. He has published research on various aspects of attention, including the books Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention: A Theory of Epistemic Agency (Cambridge University Press), and The Prospect of a Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence: Agency and Value Alignment (Bloomsbury).

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