Contemplating Computation

On spiritual practice, business culture, and technology with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, PhD, is the author of several books on technology and life, including The Distraction Addiction, Shorter, and Rest. He talked with The Empty Cup’s editor-in-chief Peter Schmidt about AI, contemplative practice, and the lessons of the private sector for Attention Activism.

Mindfulness app on the Apple Vision Pro (FlexOS)

PS: You’ve done lots of work about the relationship between technology and life in the workplace, and about the ways our agency is shaped by that relationship. Do you think anything is different about our current moment?

ASP: Things are different: they’ve gotten worse. (Welcome to 2026.) Silicon Valley has had 20 years to refine the variety of tools that it uses to make every second of our time on screens into a knife fight in a phone booth for our attention — usually in order to sell us another subscription, or something equally noble.

But on the positive side, I think the recognition that these tools are constantly in use and that they can and need to be resisted is also far greater, right? I see this in my own kids, who grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley. They had their first smartphones when they were younger than they should have been, yet today they’re deeply cynical about these devices and the motives of the tech companies. They recognize that you’re not just interacting with a cool device, or a character on a screen. You’re allowing a company that is responding to the demands of venture capital to come into your life. I think that young people are consequently more thoughtful about how they use these technologies. That’s a positive development.

More broadly, we now see young people express concern around attention and artificial intelligence, and ask really interesting and pressing questions around our interactions: from the ways in which we interact with and think about AI to concerns about the ways that AI could be used to further advance the agenda of selling us another subscription box. We also recognize the potential for this technology to adapt strategies of attention fracking so that those strategies become far more granular, responsive, and intrusive. I’m co-editing an issue of the Journal of Contemplative Studies that’s about technology and attention. Several of the pieces, interestingly, are about AI, which is not what I expected when we first put out the call for papers. But it makes perfect sense.

PS: I was going to ask about that project. Why “contemplative traditions” right now? What kind of questions do you think we need to be asking about those traditions?

ASP: The answer to the first part of the question is: Contemplative traditions always! These are practices that smart, thoughtful people have looked to for a couple thousand years when they’ve sought guidance for living better.

The second answer is that they are an obvious and accessible reaction to all of the challenges that we talk about in our work. At the micro level, there is, in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, a really interesting twinned history of contemplative practices and the history of information technologies. This part of the world is really important in the history of 20th century global Buddhism. There are a number of Buddhist temples and retreats here that have coexisted and sometimes had overlapping memberships with early computer pioneers. The Homebrew Computer Club, and early folks at Apple went on the same silent retreats, were influenced by the same spiritual authors, etc. It’s not a huge surprise that there would be some kind of conversation between them.

PS: You’re framing contemplative traditions as a place where we can find answers to some questions that have been made more acute by technology. Let’s flip that. Do you think new technologies offer us any answers to questions posed by contemplative traditions?

ASP: I think… No. These things are tools and environments, but are they answers? I would have to spend more time with that question to come to an affirmative. There’s a long history of thinking about technologies as more than just stuff. And it may be that in one of those more elaborate ways of imagining technology, you could get to a different answer. But my initial thought is that these things aren’t answers, these things are tools, and it is smartest to treat them as such.

PS: It is interesting to say that technology can’t answer these deep questions when so often they are presented as answer-providing technologies. I’d guess that 99% of the world’s population who uses AI in any capacity are simply asking it questions.

AP: Your example uses “answers” in the narrow sense of retrieving information. Yeah, our technologies do serve that purpose. I was thinking of “answers” in the broader sense, that takes the form not of information but of ways to think about — and engage — with the world and your own self. These tools provide the specific answers, but not the larger, philosophical ones.

PS: Can you give me a little more on the difference between those kinds of answers?

ASP: Sure. The answers to the question, what is the meaning of life? Or: how do I respond to this existential challenge? Etc... These are all things that in their very framing involve action, right? They are actions that tell us something about who we ought to be.

The question, “I have a tomato, a pear, and a chicken breast in my refrigerator, so what can I make for dinner?” is one that a GAI can answer, and involves action, but you’re probably not going to finish the meal being a profoundly different person.

The distinction that I would draw is between, first of all, answers that provide information versus answers that are guides to action. And secondly, the distinction between actions that involve changing oneself consciously versus quotidian things like preparing a meal.

PS: It seems like the more profound category of answers get down to the question of being — of who we are and what we are as people.

ASP: Absolutely. In my books there’s almost always one or two moments that are really critical for formulating the project and shaping my thinking about the book. And in The Distraction Addiction, one of those moments came when I was interviewing a Buddhist monk. He was originally from Denmark, and had trained as a physician and worked in big data stuff, and then… gave it all up, moved to Sri Lanka, and became a monk.

I asked him and some other monastics who had followed similar kinds of paths about their use of technology: Do you find it distracting to have a YouTube channel, or to have a blog? And it actually took a while to get clarity on the question, because at first it was like I was asking, How is it that you can put on clothes in a gravitational field? I was assuming that the source of the distractions was technology. They were coming at it with the assumption that the source of distraction is internal. And that our engagements with technology are merely an expression of the struggle that we all have to overcome what some Buddhists call “the monkey mind”, and to focus our minds and our lives around those things that truly matter. We were talking on two sides of a divide. It was really eye-opening for me.

This is something that is always in the background of my thinking about technology and attention and distraction: that for all of the incredible power and effort that Silicon Valley has invested in A-B testing every single pixel and second of our relationships with social media, YouTube, etc., or for all of the value that comes from working collectively to push back against what these technologies do and the underlying presumptions that they have — ultimately, dealing with the challenge of distraction involves as much looking inward as well as outward. It certainly helps to take that step in the company of others, to be savvy about how the tech industry aims to farm our attention, and how we can change the defaults and settings on our devices to help us focus a little more, but we’ll be most successful at using technologies more mindfully when we recognize that our minds are as great at generating distraction from within as they are at finding it out in the world.

PS: At the School, we encourage people to think about distraction not as the opposite of attention, but as a particular kind of attention that has plenty to teach us. What do you think distraction has to teach us?

ASP: First off, you’re exactly right that distraction isn’t really the absence of attention. It is something that is more purposeful. There are times when we don’t need to be focused on any particular thing. We can simply let our minds wander, and that’s perfectly safe, and it’s okay, and it’s something our minds like to do that has all kinds of benefits. I think that distraction is not the absence of attention, it is a redirection of it.

If I were to pitch a book called The Upside of Distraction, the first thing I would say is: Well, it’s proof that humans are really curious, and the world is a really interesting place. And it’s a signal that we need to learn how to interpret.

I would try to construct an argument around it somewhat the same way that people construct arguments around Attention Deficit. That this isn’t really about an inability to focus, it is a reluctance to focus on what the teacher is telling you to focus on.

PS: You’ve done a lot of writing and thinking about these questions in proximity to the business world and to Silicon Valley itself. SoRA and the Friends of Attention are expressly interested in the applications of attention beyond the productivity metrics of “time-on-task.” There’s not a ton of crossover between us and the private sector. How do you think the business world and the conversations happening there can deepen and enrich our work as attention activists?

ASP: There is a strain of people in business who are really quite deeply concerned with the question of How do you live well? Through these businesses that we build, these careers that we lead, how do we do our work in ways that make us better people, and make the place that we’re living in a better one? They’re not interested in it mainly in order to boost their annual revenues. They’re sincere about these questions as things worth pursuing on their own. The business people who write about this stuff are writing for people who are accustomed to solving problems and getting answers that they can use in their daily lives.

This kind of thinking possesses its own kind of earnestness that deserves to be taken seriously. It could teach us to speak to audiences in ways that will help them change for the better.