Quaker silence is the answer to the attention economy

“What ChatGPT can do is a marvel. We are at the dawn of a new technological era. But it is easy to see how it could turn dark — and quickly. A.I. systems like this make the production and manipulation of text (and code and images and eventually audio and video) functionally costless. They will be deployed to produce whatever makes us most likely to click. But these systems do not and cannot know what they are producing. The cost of creating and optimizing content that grabs our attention is plummeting, but the cost of producing valuable and truthful work isn’t. These are technologies that lend themselves to cacophony, not community. I fear a world in which the business models behind them run on our attention or profit off our anger. But other worlds and other models are possible…. 

The answer suggested by Rex Ambler… is silence. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members ‘sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.’ If they must decide an issue collectively, ‘they will wait in silence together, again, to discern what has to be done.’ There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. ‘To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper,’ he writes. ‘We have to let go our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.’”