CONCEPT
The Receiver's Problem
Moles's name for the challenge facing cultural audiences when the rate of message arrival exceeds the receiver's channel capacity for processing — the defining attentional challenge of the AI age.
The receiver's problem, as Moles formulated it in the context of mass media, is the challenge facing an audience when the rate at which messages arrive exceeds the receiver's channel capacity for processing them. His analysis is decades old but its scale in the AI age is new. The question is how the receiver's filtering mechanisms adapt when the production of messages becomes essentially costless. Moles's prediction is that the most critical skill in the AI age is not production but reception — the capacity to distinguish high-information-content messages from high-redundancy messages in an environment saturated with both.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The receiver's problem was already acute before AI. Every knowledge worker in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries developed coping mechanisms for information overload: folder structures, filters, priority inboxes, curation services, algorithmic recommendation. Each mechanism was a partial solution; each also introduced its own failures, missing important signals or amplifying unimportant ones.
The AI transition compounds the