By HDSR
Published on December 30, 2024
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) invites the possibility of a new marketplace for behavioral and psychological data that signals intent. This brief article introduces some initial features of that emerging marketplace. We survey recent efforts by tech executives to position the capture, manipulation, and commodification of human intentionality as a lucrative parallel to—and viable extension of—the now-dominant attention economy, which has bent consumer, civic, and media norms around users’ finite attention spans since the 1990s. We call this follow-on the intention economy. We characterize it in two ways. First, as a competition, initially, between established tech players armed with the infrastructural and data capacities needed to vie for first-mover advantage on a new frontier of persuasive technologies. Second, as a commodification of hitherto unreachable levels of explicit and implicit data that signal intent, namely those signals borne of combining (a) hyper-personalized manipulation via LLM-based sycophancy, ingratiation, and emotional infiltration and (b) increasingly detailed categorization of online activity elicited through natural language.