Attention economics, artificial intelligence, and the future of the planning profession

Abstract

Attention economics concerns itself with the study of the allocation of attention, conceptualized as a scarce resource. In this essay I relate fundamental insights from attention economics to recent advances in a specific type of artificial intelligence known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAIs GPT. I argue that the development leap known as the ‘LLM revolution’ can be expected to have a fundamental impact on planning practice. However, we should be careful not to stare ourselves blind at the expectation that LLMs will necessarily always deliver superior ‘intelligence’. Rather, it may be more helpful to think of them as providing relatively cheap synthetic competent attention, considering that attention scarcity rather than information/knowledge scarcity is the critical bottleneck within many contexts of contemporary planning practice. The essay attempts to tease out the implications of such a perspective, with a particular focus on what this could mean for the future of the planning profession.

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