Generalists and specialists in an age of attention deficit

It's getting harder and harder for us humans to concentrate for any length of time. The number of distractions surrounding us grows at an exponential pace. Attention is the new oil – businesses want to capture and monetise your attention. While scrolling through cat videos is a pleasant enough way to pass the time, is it making the most of our human potential? Are we doomed to graze on digitised mush, rather than to achieve mastery of a given specialisation?

If I have mastered one thing, it's writing and editing in the English language to a competent degree. Something that large language model AI is mastering very quickly. But I cannot mend clothes, fix a broken drainpipe, attach a display cabinet to a wall or dig a fence post. And it's too late to learn.

We are bombarded by stimuli. My email inboxes have multiple items jostling for my immediate attention. 'Read this!' 'Click here!' 'This is important!' 'Hey! There's someone on the internet who's wrong! He needs correcting! "the Ford Cortina was originally the Ford Consul Cortina before the 1964 facelift that saw a full-width grille replacing separate elliptical sidelights!" And here's my generalist's problem. My knowledge is broad and superficial rather than deep and practical. My only real skill is knowing lots of rules about grammar and punctuation what have you. Not particularly valuable in a survivalist scenario.

How long can I focus for? How long before I click on the Facebook icon? What can I do to increase the time dedicated to a single task?

My to-do list is the cornerstone of my day. Writing it all down. Prioritising stuff. Whittling down that which needs to be done from that which it would be nice to do. (Is cleaning really that important in the great scheme of things? Number one of the seven things to do today, it's the only one without a tick beside it. Cleaning can wait.) Three business-related calls, one potential member, emails that need writing, an article to edit, a small local shopping trip folded into my walk...

Tomorrow I set off to Kraków, to deliver my mother's wartime suitcase and collection of exercise books from school (SMO, Palestine, 1942-45). One thing amazes me about them is the total focus. No graffiti, no doodles, no jokes in the margins (i.e. entirely unlike my school exercise books). Heads-down no-nonsense studying. Intense concentration. Diligence. She was a long way from home, with horrors behind her and nothing but uncertainty ahead. What to do? Just get on with it. Study hard. Commit stuff to memory if it can't be explained and understood. 

Did it come in handy? If anything, the mindset and the work ethic did. Ending up in postwar Britain with no money, no family wealth to fall back on and precious little English, she did the right thing – learnt a specialised skill (comptometer operator) and worked at that until she retired. Not an interesting or glamorous job, but it was a skill that few people had. Quickly and accurately entering large columns of figures (pounds, shillings and pence) into a mechanical calculator and totting up the revenues of the businesses she worked for. Early on in her career, before her ten-year maternity break, she was earning more than my father as a junior civil engineer. Both parents established themselves materially as specialists, with a skill that was hard to acquire and few possessed. 

My father's speciality was soil mechanics. His job was to calculate the structural loads of buildings, bridges and embankments on the ground on which they stood. The responsibility for getting it right was huge (One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, the UK's tallest skyscraper from 1991 to 2012, stands on the foundations, 222 piles, driven 23m into the riverbed, that he had designed).

My parents wanted me to go into sciences or engineering. My O-levels (physics, chemistry and biology) were intended to set me in that direction. But I chose another path; so for A-levels, I did English, French and history, going to university to become an arch-generalist (Comparative American Studies, soft stuff), though topped off with a postgrad diploma in journalism (at last a trade, a skill).

Today's world, is so full of bright, noisy, distracting things, all jostling for young people's attention as they decide what they want to do with their lives, what they want to study, and once studying, distracting them further. Scroll on down, young fellows, scroll on down until you reach the very last video on TikTok.

Inherited wealth will allow more and more young people to choose what paths they want to follow, rather than chase the money doing hard things. With AI about to usher in an age of leisure, how many will follow the specialist's path, and how many will stay a generalist?

This time two years ago:
AI, metacognition and artificial consciousness
(Two years on, the jury is still out. I watched Joscha Bach on IAI last night stating absolutely that artificial consciousness is around the corner, because consciousness is computational, while Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose is equally sure that consciousness is not computational. I ask Gemini AI this question and the state-of-the-art reply, 8 May 2025 is: "There isn't a definitive scientific consensus yet, but there are compelling arguments on both sides".)

This time nine years ago:
Baletowa Blues

This time 11 years ago:
Two rainbows

This time 12 years ago:
Dandelions in bloom

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw's city centre - a deli-free zone

This time 14 years ago:
Patching up the holes

This time 16 years ago:
In search of the sublime aesthetic

This time 18 years ago:
Flying in from the Faroes

A Dream Journey through the Central Europe of my Childhood Imagination

It was a different world, a dream world. As a child I had visited it often; sparked by trips to Poland through West Germany and Czechoslovakia, journeys which had a profound influence on my aesthetic sensibilities as I was growing up. The atmosphere, the klimat, was so unlike the London suburbs in which I was born and where I grew up.

Below: have I been here before? Kind of, sort of, think so... But when? Memory can be so fickle.

Below: have you been here, in your dreams of long ago?

Below: I dreamt of trams that delivered coal. All night, fleets of tramcars haul trains of coal wagons which drop their load through trap-doors between the tracks, down chutes into coal bunkers located below the cellars of the tenements that line the city streets. Noisy, but necessary activity. Shortly after daybreak, task completed, the trams return to their more usual duties – conveying passengers to their places of work.

And I loved the cars. They were so different to our Austins, Hillmans and Jaguars! My grandmother's family lived in a flat overlooking the petrol station, so I'd often see some amazing cars. Here, for example, is a Krenzstaier 2,8 Liter (in Luxus trim), a favourite among local plutocrats and captains of industry.

Did I dream that my mother bought me a model of one of those cars that fascinated me so? Is it still up there, in my late parents' attic?

Let's cross the tracks to another part of town... this is the line that skirts the western side of the city.

And I'd often take the opportunity to check out the Metro system, which back then still used rolling stock that dated back to the early 1920s!

Here's another one, the trains used on Line No. 2... These had an additional headlamp to provide extra lighting in the long tunnel sections in the distant suburbs

Line 3 stations were my favourite ones on the network – note the chandeliers. 

Below: "The streets were deserted/The police were alerted" – looks like one of those black saloon cars favoured by the state security apparatus heading our way. My father prudently hides his camera.

The car passes without incident. Let's continue our stroll. Almost back at my grandmother's...

Below: the bar on the corner of the street where they live. Looking at this image today, I've become quite thirsty, and fetch myself a bottle of Lützaner pils from the cellar.

Your very good health! The Beer Magnate'f  fineft offering. Beer, as I could only imagine. Cheers!

You will have guessed by now that these images are AI generated. I used Google Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro with Imagen 3. Compared with my early attempts with AI-generated art, it's so much better in responding to my prompts. The pictures really click with my imagined world, dreams triggered by visits to Poland in the 1960s.

AI art is controversial. Is the content, the intellectual property of millions of creators, being scraped, royalty-free for the benefit of the tech giants? Or has a new creative tool been handed to humanity, just waiting for our imagination to be let loose on it? I'd be keen for your feedback.

Each of the above images is unique. I could type in exactly the same prompt a million times, and never get the same image again.

This time last year:
Poland's sleeper trains: 2024 timetable

This time two years ago:
City-centre notes
[One week living in Warsaw's Nowe Miasto]

This time four years ago:
First snow for ages!

This time five years ago:

Politics and personal responsibility

This time six years ago:
Consciousness, memory and spirit of place

This time seven years ago:
Polish Perivale

This time eight years ago:
Power in the vertical

This time 12 years ago:
And still they come [anomalous flashbacks that is]

This time 13 years ago:
Classic glass

This time 14 years ago:
What's the Polish for 'pattern'?

This time 16 years ago:
"Rorate caeli de super nubes pluant justum..."

AI, metacognition and Artificial Consciousness

Here's a challenge for any artificial intelligence taking the Turing test - "Describe a flashback or déjà vu moment you recently experienced." I must say, ChatGPT failed dismally when I asked it, replying that as an AI language model it has no such personal experiences, after which it proceeded to trot out Wikipedia's descriptions of both phenomena.

Flashbacks, or déjà vus, memories of qualia experiences - are to me an intrinsic part of what it is to be me. Walking back from the shops along a farm track today, I had one of these qualia memories of driving with my parents from London to South Wales in the early 1960s, a National Benzole petrol station, ivory-painted tin shack with pumps outside, probably somewhere in Gloucestershire, on the route of the old A40. It may have been triggered by the orchards in bloom, but the memory was very clear, and led on to the memory that my mother would tell me how even at the age of three I could identify all the petrol stations by their logos - Shell, Esho (as I'd pronounce Esso), National, Cleveland and BP.

I suspect that with time AI language models will learn - or be taught - what it is that humans define as 'flashbacks' and be able to hallucinate one up on demand, making it indistinguishable from an answer given by a random human when asked the same question. Now, whether a computer can ever tell us what it feels like to be a computer, to subjectively experience the being-ness of a computer and verbalise that to humans so we can empathise with its emotions - I doubt. Can we ever really tell whether a computer understands something, or does it merely regurgitate stored data in a logical manner? And more's to the point - will computers ever learn intuition? Does one even learn to intuit?

To me qualia experiences - such as the one I'm getting right now looking out of my window on the wood next door, bright green leaves bathed in sunshine - are the quintessence of what it is to be conscious. Even with the image in front of my eyes, and the full suite of Photoshop tools at my disposal, the image below delivers only a rough approximation of what I'm experiencing when I look up at this actual scene from the digital representation of it, which I share with you, below. 

Artificial consciousness, therefore, will, I believe, be out of reach to silicon-based computing. Yes, AIs will evolve - quickly - into AGIs (artificial general intelligences) - and though they may reason and learn and even create net new knowledge, the actual conscious experience of qualia will be beyond them. What of memory? ChatGPT has a record of each one of my hundreds of chats I've had with it since January 2023, but that's just data; there's no emotion there - no surprise or delight or dismay at being asked a question, like a bright pupil may have in a classroom encounter with a teacher.

Metacognition - thinking about thinking, monitoring one's own thought process, higher-level awareness that one is in the process of thinking and how that thought process can be optimised - is something that computers may be trained to learn. With leading AI researchers saying that they no longer know what's going on within the box once machine learning gets going - we see only input and output - we have little idea how metacognition is developing within large AI systems. But even advanced metacognitive skills are no proof of consciousness, only reason. 

Again, I turn to ChatGPT:

I would posit that even advanced AI systems that have high levels of metacognition would still not be conscious - with the proviso that once quantum computing becomes a reality, then things might change.

Quantum computing - which depend on qubits that, unlike bits (zeros or ones), are both zeros and ones at the same time, held in that superposition until the wave function decoheres. This property is known to be able to increase computers' number-crunching capabilities exponentially. Once the engineering problems are solved (like having to operate at near absolute-zero temperature), quantum computers could represent a huge leap forward. Now, according to Penrose and Hameroff, consciousness is a quantum phenomenon that takes place within microtubules within neurons (the Orch-OR theory first posited nearly 30 years ago).

So - say some AI researchers - future AI systems based on quantum computers rather than today's silicon-based processors - could be able to display something that is a semblance of genuine consciousness. 

But even Sir Roger Penrose has stated on many occasions that consciousness is not computational. And here's the nub of the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness - whether it is an emergent epiphenomenon of evolution, something that's limited to the brains of higher-order animals on our planet (and who knows - on other planets too?) or whether consciousness permeates the Cosmos and is everywhere - or whether it pops into existence in the right conditions. I'll leave the last word to ChatGPT:

Current understanding of consciousness is still limited, and there is no consensus on what it is, how it arises, or how it can be simulated or replicated.

This time seven years ago:
Baletowa Blues

This time nine years ago:
Two rainbows

This time ten years ago:
Dandelions in bloom

This time 11 years ago:
Warsaw's city centre - a deli-free zone

This time 12 years ago:
Patching up the holes

This time 14 years ago:
In search of the sublime aesthetic

This time 16 years ago:
Flying in from the Faroes