On Stratified Attention, Part 2 of 3

Attendant to the rise of AI has come what we’ll call the Division of Dignity Fallacy - which holds that the human actor gets to do all the fun, sexy thinking - your decisionings, your judgmentations, etc. - and that the AI agent gets stuck with all the mental scut-work - your computings, your collationings, etc. This is perhaps broad-brush true, but is at best reductive. Such a (falsely) sharp divide ignores the symbiotic character of this newly hatched co-cognition. disregards Much of the difficulty we face when endeavoring to fold AI into our work has to do with grossly overestimating what it can do, broadly misinterpreting what it is for. A month or so ago on LinkedIn*, I wrote up this sketch of co-founder Peter Binggeser’s workflow/mode of working/mindset about work - as a model of the kind of stratified attention we’re talking about here, as relates to AI use, you could do a lot worse than adopting something of Pete’s approach. His effectiveness - in an array of areas from woodworking projects to chicken care to consulting with corporations and nonprofits to building new capabilities into zv1, the ZeroWidth AI workbench, to reconfiguring his scratch-built synthesizer - is due as much to Pete’s eclectic-and-growing skillset as to his impressively plate-spinning cognitive style.

* NB: If you find you sometimes don’t wish for the Entire Big Honkin’ Multi-Course Buffet of these posts, following ZeroWidth on LinkedIn is where you can find our more Tapas-Sized Small Plate Posts - bon appetit!

Pete’s is what I’ve come to regard as a profoundly Observed Cognition, meaning some portion of his considerable brainpower is dedicated to witnessing what is of interest, what things on his present docket are puzzling and needs solving, what’s a looming problem that he can’t yet even describe. This Observed Cognition is not Policed or Surveiled Cognition of the anxious or shame-based variety - seizing on “wrong” thinking and castigating oneself for having thought it - nor is it the Compulsive Cognition of the fixated who tumble into a thought-trench and have trouble scrambling out again. Pete’s is an Observed Cognition is more like there’s an interested bystander always present, a tolerant and keen-eyed witness, a bemused well-wisher, maybe, who takes note of everything, keeps a running tally of relative importance and urgency, which contingencies are connected to what outcomes, which components are dependent upon resolving other factors in order to progress, etc.

When Pete walks us through a demo of new features to the zv1 workbench, say, he’ll hit the inevitable glitch or a snag or some little irritant impeding process or functionality, and will simply fold that new item into his perpetually unfurling to-do list and carry on without breaking stride. As with my plotting quandary cited in Part 1 of this 3-Part series, there is the sense of the item in question not disappearing from Pete’s mental view, just receding to some more dimly lit corner of consciousness where it’ll get tended to later.

In fact, there is an accretive effect of these (seemingly) stray bits and bobs that begin as small-scale frustrations and misfires - these can aggregate inside the machinery of a Pete-brain into larger-scale conceptions - recently this tendency coalesced into the seeds of fundamentally reimagining ZeroWidth’s ENTIRE approach. In rapid consultation with John, the two of them essentially concluded that the enterprise must adopt an altogether different position within the fast-moving AI landscape, and that the direction the company had been heading would not be the course it continued pursuing. In a future post, I will tell the story of this transformation, but it’s salient here to note that story arose not from analysis carried out and recommendations made by AI, but from the deeply noticed realities of process and priority throughout the company’s work, a meta-cognitive act that constitutes the highest form of the Stratified Attention we’re talking about - a form of attention not fixated on task or project or plans, but that funnels all that upward to consider one’s place in the world and one’s orientation and bearing in the map one is making.

Mindset Sidebar: Pete trained as an architect, John as a designer - both of which are without question creative fields. But I’m struck over and over again by the comparative lack of ego in both of them - my background is in the arts, where the Self-Doubt Meltdown and Various Forms of Flying Off the Handle are commonplace, usually attributable to some form of ego-fueled maladjustment. The orientation I see in Cain and Binggeser centers squarely on the project at hand, the obstacles in need of overcoming, the optimal pathway to best outcomes. As such, there is little to no ego investment in “ownership” of ideas, or in the eager credit-claiming/blame-deflecting that’s so commonplace in the arts. True, yes, performing in a play that requires raw, volcanic emotion is inherently more vulnerable-making than plotting out the HVAC for a shopping center or whatever, so the actor’s neuroses are more comprehensible, maybe, but are no less draining - of time, of colleagues’ good will, of focus, etc.

Takeaway: Your existing capacity for Stratified Attention is an indispensable asset when folding AI-enabled platforms into the performance of your work. This capacity permits you to deploy AI across multiple timescales and degrees of urgency, have it stress-test approaches and prototypes while you consider next moves, solicit the feedback and input of others while you map out something else. This is a distinction between ability (which you have) and skill (which you might not yet have, but can learn); between what we have (intrinsic) and what we acquire (cultivated).

In another piece on the ZeroWidth LinkedIn page, I describe something of Pete’s considerable facility with Stratified Attention (“Mind as Mixing Board” - HERE) that have him toggling pretty seamlessly between Virtual and Actual, between Home and Work, between multiple Arenas of Inquiry and Activity. What we don’t make much mention of that piece is a phenomenon Pete notes specifically pertaining to a highly particular degree of difficulty associated with this emergent form of work, namely the Decision Fatigue that attends this kind of executive function co-cognition with AI-enabled platforms.

In short, there is a cognitive toll, a specific form of mental fatigue that attends this brand variable thinking - a form of thought that requires defining the nature and scope of problems, mapping potential solution pathways, identifying steps, devising assessment criteria, testing and revising all components - an essentially constant cycle of invention, evaluation, and refinement. Understandably, this cycle is mentally taxing, a cognition sport that’s incredibly demanding, one that’s both a sprint and an endurance trial - when Pete’s in full development mode like this, he reports that he can go at it for three or four hours at a stretch before he’s brain-fried.

It is worth pausing here to emphasize: mental fatigue is real, it is universally experienced, and we ought to factor more prominently and deliberately it into the way we conceive of work. In Part 3 of this Stratified Attention series, we’ll consider some of the workplace implications of folding AI into the way we operate.

We’ve all experienced that moment after a period of sustained, intense focus where our brain goes rubber-legged and abandons all sharpness. AI, obviously, never gets winded, never flags or needs downtime. But since it is we who are the conductors of this cognitive orchestra, we who must drive and shape and direct the flow and outcomes of this collaborative endeavor, we who are the lead car on the thinking train, we must become adept at:

Recognizing when our brains have reached their limit on a given session of decisioning, and to be OK with the need to step aside for a spell.

Harnessing the tirelessness of AI to have it persist in carrying out tasks while we power down - this is where the Observed Cognition cited above becomes indispensable: noting our own finite capacities, tracking the tempo and progression of the cycles of the ongoing activity we’re orchestrating with AI, and sync-ing our fatigue level with an ability to pass assignments to our AI-enabled Non-Napping, Ever-Ready colleague that it can complete whilst we rejuvenate.

Becoming adept at hopping back into work mid-stream, picking up not where WE left off when we needed rest, but flash-assessing what the AI’s been up to in our absence and recalibrating all our markers of assessment, making updates and adjustments on the fly.

Next time, we’ll conclude this series by contemplating what all this might mean for the world of our workplace and the ways we need to adjust our expectations, and the (potentially wide-ranging) impacts on operational realities.