The Invisible Trillion · The Attention Chapter

The Actually Scarce Resource

So if the bottleneck is you — your attention, your time, your capacity to absorb — then the question “am I wasting AI?” is actually less interesting than the question “am I wasting myself?”

The electricity for a ChatGPT query costs maybe a tenth of a cent. Your time costs vastly more. Your attention — the stuff you use to understand things, make decisions, notice when people you love are sad — is the most precious resource you have, and nobody makes more of it.

If you ask AI a lazy question and skim the answer, the kilowatt-hours were not the waste. You were the waste. The electricity will be replaced by the next spin of a wind turbine. The ten minutes of your life and the erosion of your attention span? Those don’t come back.

This is the frame shift this chapter is trying to make.

The old frame: compute is expensive, I should use less of it to save the planet.

The new frame: compute is cheap and getting cheaper, but my attention is finite and my life is short, so I should use AI well.

“Well” means different things in different situations, but most of them cash out in one idea: ask better questions, and actually metabolize the answers.

What Good Consumption Looks Like

If you wanted to be a good consumer of intelligence — AI or otherwise — here are the things that seem to matter.

Know what you’re trying to learn. The difference between a useless AI conversation and a useful one is almost always in the question, not the answer. Vague questions get vague answers. “Tell me about the French Revolution” is a worse prompt than “I don’t understand why the Reign of Terror happened after the moderate phase; what changed?” The second one produces an answer you can actually absorb, because you already have a hook in your brain for it to hang on. The first produces a wall of text that slides off.

Read the answer. Really read it. Don’t skim. If the answer is long enough to scroll, you are not engaging with it; you are comforting yourself with the presence of information. Close the tab. Ask a shorter question next time.

Notice when you’re using AI to avoid thinking. This is the part that will make adults look sanctimonious, so I’ll try not to. But honestly: there is a difference between “I’m stuck, AI help me see the next step” and “I don’t want to think about this, AI do it for me.” The first builds your brain. The second atrophies it. You can feel the difference if you pay attention. The problem is that paying attention is exactly the skill you’re giving up.

Use AI for the parts where it’s actually better than you. Summarizing long documents, translating languages, generating first drafts you then edit, explaining concepts in different ways until one sticks, doing calculations, checking your reasoning. These are things AI is great at and you can verify.

Don’t use AI for the parts where it’s worse. Judgment calls about your own life. Emotional conversations that need a real human. Final decisions about things that matter. Creative work you actually want to be yours. Learning that requires struggle — the struggle is the point.

Maintain the ability to do things without AI. This is worth stating clearly because nobody else will. There will be times in your life when the internet doesn’t work, or the AI is down, or you’re somewhere it’s inappropriate, or you just want to know that you can. Maintain the muscle. Write things by hand sometimes. Do math in your head sometimes. Read a whole book without notes sometimes. The fact that you can do these things without help is part of what makes you you, and it is worth keeping even when there are easier options.

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