The machine that cannot be bored

Pascal thought most of humanity's troubles came from a single source, our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He wrote that in the 1650s, long before anyone could carry a library in a pocket, and it has aged well. We are worse at being bored than ever, and we have built extraordinary machines to make sure we never have to be.

The newest of those machines has a curious property. A language model has no capacity for boredom at all. Ask it to summarise the same report forty times and it will do so forty times with identical patience. Ask it to read a novel overnight and it will finish by morning without once looking out of the window. Whatever these systems are, they do not experience the long afternoon.

That absence turns out to be interesting, because boredom has always done a quiet kind of work for us.

What boredom is for

Walter Benjamin, in his essay on the storyteller, called boredom the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. He meant that stories used to be told during slack time, while people spun wool or mended nets, and that the slackness was what let the stories settle in. A listener whose hands were busy and whose mind was half idle would absorb a tale deeply enough to pass it on. Remove the idle hours and you remove the conditions for that kind of remembering.

Heidegger spent a whole lecture course, in the winter of 1929, on boredom. He distinguished between being bored by something, a late train or a dull guest, and a deeper boredom in which the whole world seems to withdraw its interest from us. That deeper state, he argued, was uncomfortable but revealing. It showed us that our ordinary busyness was a way of not noticing our own lives.

Boredom is where the mind goes when nothing is asking it for anything.

You do not need to accept either theory to recognise the experience behind them. Many of the ideas that matter most arrive in the shower, on a walk, on the bus with a dead phone. They come when attention has nothing to hold and begins, almost against its will, to wander back toward what it has been avoiding.

A different kind of reader

A machine that cannot be bored reads in a fundamentally different way from us. It has no slack, no drifting, no moment where the eye leaves the page and the mind begins to connect what it has read with something else entirely. Its patience is total and, in a sense, empty. It will attend to anything, and it has no idle hours in which the reading can settle.

This makes it a superb assistant for certain tasks. It can sift a thousand articles overnight and set aside the forty most likely to repay a human reader. We use it that way ourselves. The Review you receive each morning is assembled with that kind of help, which spares a person the drudgery of skimming feeds and leaves more time for the reading that matters.

It also makes the machine a poor substitute for the reading itself. The value of a difficult novel lies partly in the hours you spend not quite following it, in the boredom of the slow middle chapters, in the scenes you only understand a week later while doing something else. Hand that work entirely to a system that cannot drift and you get the summary without the settling.

Keeping the long afternoon

The machines are useful, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What matters is being clear about what they cannot do on our behalf.

They cannot be bored for us. They cannot wait through the dull stretch of a book until it turns, unexpectedly, into the part that changes our minds. They cannot sit in Pascal's room. That remains our job, and it may matter more now than it did when there was nothing else to do with an empty evening.

So let the machine do the sifting. Then put it away, pick up the thing it found, and allow yourself to be bored by it for a while. Something may hatch.