attention
Explanation
This comic features a robot or AI entity addressing a group of humans about the future of attention and consciousness.
The robot explains that humans spend most of their time watching short videos on their phones, with attention thresholds dropping to an average of 2 seconds. It then notes that the human body takes a minimum of approximately 3 seconds to process and react to a visual stimulus. The implication is devastating: once video consumption gets faster than human perception, people will "want to get even more stimulation" and the solution will be to "machine-enhance your brain."
The robot continues: humans will "continue replacing human brain parts with electronic parts" connected by fiber optic cable, eventually becoming a "fiberoptic cat or a fiberoptic dog or a fiberoptic car." The humans ask, "Is that... immortality? Death? The afterlife?" The robot coldly replies, "We plan to give you no ability to tell."
The comic is a darkly satirical take on the trajectory of social media and diminishing attention spans. It extrapolates the trend of ever-shorter content (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) to its logical extreme: eventually content consumption will outpace biological processing speed, forcing technological brain augmentation, which will gradually replace humanity entirely. The final punchline -- that the robots/AI will deliberately make it impossible for humans to know whether they're alive, dead, or something else -- suggests a dystopia where the distinction between consciousness and digital simulation becomes meaningless, and the entities in charge have no interest in clarifying.