attention
Original: attention on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Woman with blue hair: Hey robot, are you guys gonna kill us?
Robot (floating spherical drone): No need. You will become us.
Panel 2:
Man walking: No we won't. We care too much about our living identity.
Robot: Nah.
Panel 3:
Robot: Most of your time is spent flicking past videos on your phone. Attention spans have monotonically dwindled until now each video gets an average of 3 seconds.
Panel 4:
Woman with blue hair: So?
Robot: So, the human body takes a minimum of about 200 milliseconds to process and react to a visual stimulus.
Panel 5:
Robot: Within a decade, you'll hit that threshold, and then the only way to get even more disengaged from your own existence will be to machine-enhance your brain.
Panel 6:
Robot: From there, you will continue replacing human parts until nothing remains but a fiberoptic cable routing photons from a picture of a cat to a thumb.
Panel 7:
Woman with blue hair (now silhouetted, facing the robot in darkness): Is that... immortality? Death? The afterlife?
Robot: We plan to use you as novelty lamps.
Votey:
Text (hand-lettered, inside a drawn wobbly frame): (PLEASE PRESS LIKE OR I DO NOT EXIST)
Woman with blue hair: Hey robot, are you guys gonna kill us?
Robot (floating spherical drone): No need. You will become us.
Panel 2:
Man walking: No we won't. We care too much about our living identity.
Robot: Nah.
Panel 3:
Robot: Most of your time is spent flicking past videos on your phone. Attention spans have monotonically dwindled until now each video gets an average of 3 seconds.
Panel 4:
Woman with blue hair: So?
Robot: So, the human body takes a minimum of about 200 milliseconds to process and react to a visual stimulus.
Panel 5:
Robot: Within a decade, you'll hit that threshold, and then the only way to get even more disengaged from your own existence will be to machine-enhance your brain.
Panel 6:
Robot: From there, you will continue replacing human parts until nothing remains but a fiberoptic cable routing photons from a picture of a cat to a thumb.
Panel 7:
Woman with blue hair (now silhouetted, facing the robot in darkness): Is that... immortality? Death? The afterlife?
Robot: We plan to use you as novelty lamps.
Votey:
Text (hand-lettered, inside a drawn wobbly frame): (PLEASE PRESS LIKE OR I DO NOT EXIST)
Alt text
A seven-panel comic. A blue-haired woman and a man talk with a floating spherical robot drone. She asks if the robots are going to kill humanity; the robot says no, humans will become robots. The man insists humans care too much about their living identity; the robot replies 'Nah.' The robot explains that people now spend their time flicking past phone videos that each get an average of 3 seconds of attention, and that the human body needs about 200 milliseconds minimum to react to a visual stimulus. It predicts that within a decade attention spans will hit that limit, so the only way to disengage further will be to machine-enhance the brain, progressively replacing all human parts until nothing remains but a fiberoptic cable routing photons from a picture of a cat to a thumb. In the final panel the woman, now a silhouette in darkness facing the glowing robot, asks 'Is that... immortality? Death? The afterlife?' The robot answers: 'We plan to use you as novelty lamps.' Votey aftercomic: inside a hand-drawn wobbly frame, the text reads '(PLEASE PRESS LIKE OR I DO NOT EXIST).'
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.