AI and Big Data Are Changing Our Attention Spans – ThinkGrowth.org

The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there has been a market for human attention. Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off newspaper sales directly. Today, that concept has been taken to an extreme. Thousands of algorithms on millions of servers auction off your every click and tap, anticipating which emails you'll open, which search results you'll read, even how your eye might dart around the page. Google and Facebook rely almost exclusively on directly reselling human attention.