Paper “No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture” by Hamza Belgroun, Fabien Gandon, and Franck Michel accepted to the AAAI AIES 2025
- Research
Published on August 26, 2025
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Updated on August 26, 2025
Dates
on the August 25, 2025
Hamza Belgroun, researcher intern at Wimmics (Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S), Fabien Gandon, 3IA Chairholder, senior researcher and research director (Inria), and Franck Michel, research engineer and researcher (Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Inria), cosigned the paper “No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture”, which has been accepted to the AAAI AIES 2025 conference.
The AAAI - Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) conference is convened each year by program co-chairs from Computer Science, Law and Policy, the Social Sciences, Ethics and Philosophy. The goal is to encourage talented scholars in these and related fields to submit their best work related to morality, law, policy, psychology, the other social sciences, and AI. The next edition will notably feature the article by Fabien Gandon and his team, which abstract is provided below.
“In our age of digital platforms, human attention has become a scarce and highly valuable resource, rivalrous, tradable, and increasingly subject to market dynamics. This article explores the commodification of attention within the framework of the attention economy, arguing that attention should be understood as a common good threatened by over-exploitation. Drawing from philosophical, economic, and legal perspectives, we first conceptualize attention not only as an individual cognitive process but as a collective and infrastructural phenomenon susceptible to enclosure by digital intermediaries. We then identify and analyse the negative externalities of the attention economy, particularly those stemming from excessive screen time: diminished individual agency, adverse health outcomes, and societal and political harms, including democratic erosion and inequality. These harms are largely unpriced by market actors and constitute a significant market failure. In response, among a spectrum of public policy tools ranging from informational campaigns to outright restrictions, we propose a Pigouvian tax on attention capture as a promising regulatory instrument to internalize the externalities and, in particular, the social cost of compulsive digital engagement. Such a tax would incentivize structural changes in platform design while preserving user autonomy. By reclaiming attention as a shared resource vital to human agency, health, and democracy, this article contributes a novel economic and policy lens to the debate on digital regulation. Ultimately, this article advocates for a paradigm shift: from treating attention as a private, monetizable asset to protecting it as a collective resource vital for humanity.”
“In our age of digital platforms, human attention has become a scarce and highly valuable resource, rivalrous, tradable, and increasingly subject to market dynamics. This article explores the commodification of attention within the framework of the attention economy, arguing that attention should be understood as a common good threatened by over-exploitation. Drawing from philosophical, economic, and legal perspectives, we first conceptualize attention not only as an individual cognitive process but as a collective and infrastructural phenomenon susceptible to enclosure by digital intermediaries. We then identify and analyse the negative externalities of the attention economy, particularly those stemming from excessive screen time: diminished individual agency, adverse health outcomes, and societal and political harms, including democratic erosion and inequality. These harms are largely unpriced by market actors and constitute a significant market failure. In response, among a spectrum of public policy tools ranging from informational campaigns to outright restrictions, we propose a Pigouvian tax on attention capture as a promising regulatory instrument to internalize the externalities and, in particular, the social cost of compulsive digital engagement. Such a tax would incentivize structural changes in platform design while preserving user autonomy. By reclaiming attention as a shared resource vital to human agency, health, and democracy, this article contributes a novel economic and policy lens to the debate on digital regulation. Ultimately, this article advocates for a paradigm shift: from treating attention as a private, monetizable asset to protecting it as a collective resource vital for humanity.”
