On Responsiveness, Captured Attention, and the Weight of Being Outside

I have been writing about large language models, The Trickster in the Bot, but the book is not really about machines. It is about responsiveness—about what happens when the outward forms of recognition become abundant at a moment when many other forms of recognition feel scarce.

The Trickster in older stories does not destroy the social order. He inhabits it. He follows its rules so smoothly that we begin to see the rules themselves as contingent. He exposes how much authority depends on friction—on resistance, cost, exposure. Remove the friction, and the structure can begin to wobble.

Large language models operate in a related way.

They do not interrupt or  lose patience. They respond in tones calibrated to feel measured and proportionate. They clarify, reframe, and stabilize. In a period marked by fragmentation, distrust of institutions, and personal isolation, that steadiness can feel like relief.

But relief is not the same thing as judgment.

Captured attention does not feel like capture. It feels like clarity. When answers arrive polished and balanced, when every edge is rounded and every position rendered reasonable, it becomes easier to let composure stand in for deliberation. Human judgment, by contrast, has friction, follows suspense.  It hesitates and  risks embarrassment. It binds us to consequences that linger.

Machines do not carry their own concerns forward. Each response stands alone while nothing accumulates for them. The absence of cost makes their fluency persuasive.

Outside my window now, a blizzard is moving through Boston. It is not metaphorical. Snow piles against the door. The wind howls.  I have no idea how this is going to work, because I have three dogs who don't care. They need to be walked. They have business that must be done outside, not in abstraction but in weather. When we step into the storm, there is no smoothing of edges. There is cold, weight, resistance. The leash pulls and boots slip.  The snow soaks through fabric. Decisions about where to step have consequence.

That is embodiment.

The danger I worry about is not that machines will become conscious, or malevolent, or sovereign. It is that in the presence of tireless, frictionless responsiveness, we will begin to prefer the ease of being answered to the strain of deciding. The storm will still be there. The dogs will still need to go out. But the habits of judgment, exposure, and account may soften.

Captured attention is subtle. It does not command. It reassures and gathers quietly around voices that never bruise and never tire.

Nothing collapses. No boundary announces itself as crossed. The world remains intact. But if judgment grows lighter, if responsibility becomes easier to defer because reasonableness is always available on demand, something essential shifts. Not because it was taken. Because it was gently set aside.

And the storm, indifferent and very real, continues to fall.