CONCEPT
The Living Wage of Attention
The extension of Webb's living-wage concept to the cognitive economy — the minimum allocation of attentional resources a worker must retain to sustain cognitive health, meaningful relationships, and civic participation.
Webb's concept of the living wage — the minimum monetary compensation necessary to sustain a worker in physical efficiency and civic participation — was among her most enduring contributions to social policy. The living wage encompassed nutrition, housing, clothing, healthcare, education, recreation, and the civic participation democratic citizenship requires. The AI age demands an analogous concept for cognitive life: the living wage of attention is the minimum attentional resource a worker must retain to sustain creative capacity, psychological equilibrium, meaningful relationships, and democratic engagement. A technology — or an employer — that absorbs more than this minimum is imposing a form of exploitation no less real for being cognitive rather than physical.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The worker who sits down to collaborate with an AI system enters a relationship that demands continuous cognitive engagement — evaluating output, refining prompts, directing the system's efforts, integrating contributions with her own judgment. This engagement is productive, but it