The End of Part of Human Work and the Struggle for Human Attention

If machines do more and more of what we once called human work, where will the liberated attention go?

For centuries, a large part of human life has been organized by one question:

how will I survive?

Work.

Get paid.

Pay bills.

Produce.

Secure food.

Secure housing.

Secure the future of one’s children.

Work does not occupy only the hours in which we are working.

It also occupies anticipations:

the next bill,
the next paycheck,
the fear of losing a job,
the deadline,
the debt,
what still needs to be produced.

In BrainLatam’s 5D Consciousness hypothesis, these concerns are not abstract words floating outside the organism. They participate in distributed material configurations within the real 3D space of the Body-Territory: neural activity, metabolism, autonomic states, tension, memory, expectation, attention, and movement.

Now something is beginning to change.

AI May Transform Work Before It Eliminates It

A joint ILO and World Bank study estimated in 2024 that between 26% and 38% of jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean could be influenced by generative artificial intelligence.

The conclusion is not that all these jobs will disappear.

In many cases, tasks will be transformed, automated, or reorganized.

The 2025 Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index, developed by Chile’s CENIA and ECLAC, shows that AI adoption is already advancing rapidly across the region, although major inequalities remain in infrastructure, training, and governance.

The BrainLatam question, therefore, is not:

when will human work end?

It is:

if we progressively need less human labor to produce what we need, where will the movements, attention, and time once organized by work go?

Returning Income Is Not Yet Returning Freedom

In the BrainLatam proposal, the Daily Citizen Drex would function as a universal infrastructure of material belonging.

Not because someone proved poverty.

But because that person belongs to the political community.

It is important to distinguish our hypothesis from the Drex currently being developed by the Central Bank of Brazil. The official project is a digital infrastructure for programmable transactions and assets; end users are still simulated within the pilot environment.

Citizen Drex is a BrainLatam proposal, not an existing public policy.

The Biome Income would add another principle:

part of prosperity should depend on preserving the territorial conditions that make life possible.

Income would no longer depend exclusively on the need to keep producing more.

But solving economic urgency does not automatically solve human freedom.

Because a Body-Territory may receive time and still repeat exactly the same movements it has learned.

Yãy hã mĩy: Imitating in Order to Transform

Among the Tikmũ’ũn, Isael and Sueli Maxakali have presented Yãy hã mĩy in relation to transformation. In narratives brought to the Mundos Indígenas exhibition, imitation and transformation appear connected: beings, animals, plants, and people transform; imitation participates in this dynamic.

This formulation belongs to the Tikmũ’ũn world and should not be reduced to a Western neuroscientific theory.

BrainLatam calls its own extrapolation Extended Yãy hã mĩy:

we observe
→ imitate
→ repeat
→ learn
→ incorporate.

A movement that initially requires attention may become repertoire.

We operationally call this embodied confidence:

Body Faith.

It is not necessarily religious faith.

It is the Body-Territory no longer needing to consciously reconsider every step of something it has already learned to do.

This is indispensable.

Without some form of Body Faith, we would need to relearn how to walk every morning.

When Body Faith Becomes Blind Faith

The same mechanism that creates efficiency can also create closure.

A solution works.

So we repeat it.

It continues to work.

We stop searching.

At BrainLatam we use the metaphor of the:

Local Optimum.

A local optimum does not need to be false.

It is a solution that works sufficiently well in one region of a problem that exploration of other regions stops.

BrainLatam has already applied this idea to beliefs and perceptual repertoires as a metaphor explicitly inspired by optimization problems.

Then:

“this works”

can become:

“this is the only possible way.”

And later:

“this is who I am.”

This is where Body Faith may become what we call Blind Faith.

It can happen with a religion.

But also with a scientific theory.

An ideology.

A profession.

An economic model.

A routine.

Or an algorithm.

The problem is not believing. The problem is losing the ability to compare.

You Can Also Be Massified by the Perceptions You Never Had

Here appears one of BrainLatam’s central concerns:

you can be massified by the perceptions you never had.

We do not need to imagine someone secretly controlling everything.

All communication selects.

A newspaper selects events.

A platform orders content.

A school chooses curricula.

A religion offers symbols.

A government communicates priorities.

A company presents its interests.

Selection does not necessarily mean lying.

But it means that:

what reached us is never equal to all the possibilities that could have reached us.

Chilean researcher Sebastián Valenzuela showed in 2024 how algorithms increasingly perform functions comparable to editors, participating in the definition of what gains visibility in digital environments. He has also argued for greater “algorithmic awareness” among citizens.

BrainLatam calls this environment the:

Informational Territory

Whoever organizes repetition, priority, and visibility does not need to decide what we will believe.

They can modify what we will have enough opportunity to perceive in order to think about it.

Freeing the Worker From the Factory Is Not Enough

Now imagine that AI and robots drastically reduce repetitive work.

Citizen Drex reduces economic insecurity.

Biome Income reduces the advantage of producing excess.

Eight hours are returned.

What happens?

If those eight hours are immediately filled by:

infinite feeds,

advertising,

videos,

games,

consumption,

comparison,

continuous AI-generated content,

perhaps we have freed the body from the factory without freeing perception.

Therefore:

free time is not necessarily perceptually free time.

A post-work society will need to develop what we call:

Attention Sovereignty

The capacity to recognize:

what is capturing my attention?
what is being repeated?
what almost never appears?
which emotion is being mobilized?
what other questions could exist?

Emotional Education Becomes Democratic Infrastructure

A society that reduces repetitive work will need to educate for something other than productivity.

In 2024, Chilean researchers reviewed the literature on emotion and learning and emphasized how emotional states influence behavior, willingness to learn, and social and academic performance.

For BrainLatam, emotional education does not mean teaching someone which emotion they should feel.

It means increasing differentiation:

what am I feeling?
where might this be coming from?
what is my body doing?
which interpretation am I repeating?

The broader the perceptual repertoire, the less necessary it becomes to remain trapped within a single local optimum.

Bribri Prosperity: Producing Value Without Producing Excess

Here enters our proposal of Bribri Prosperity.

The name is a BrainLatam formulation inspired by dialogue with Bribri perspectives and is not a definition attributed to the Bribri people.

Costa Rican researcher David Arias-Hidalgo published a decolonial study in 2023 in dialogue with a Bribri notion of buen vivir. Recent research carried out with Bribri leadership also shows that suffering, existence, collectivity, and spatial-temporal order cannot be adequately understood when reduced to an isolated individual.

Our Bribri Prosperity would be similar to the horizon of Zero Waste:

not asking only:

how much can we produce?

But:

how much value for life can we produce without leaving excess for the future to metabolize?

Reused water.

Circularity.

Less waste.

Protected forests.

Local production.

Clean energy.

Recovered biomes.

Colombian researchers showed in 2023 the rapid expansion of circular-economy research in Latin America, reflecting the regional search for alternatives to linear models of extraction, production, and disposal.

BrainLatam’s Bribri Prosperity adds:

prosperity is increasing the possibility of life for the Body-Territory and the biome, not simply increasing the amount of things produced.

Liberating Representations May Change Lived Time

Today, several representations remain continuously pre-activated:

salary,
debt,
deadline,
job,
survival.

If these representations are activated less frequently, they may lose priority and phenomenological intensity.

This does not mean brain regions become “empty.”

In the 5D hypothesis, it means that certain material movements stop dominating the set of differences that acquire qualia.

And other movements may gain space.

Brazilian researcher André Cravo and colleagues showed in 2022 that the subjective passage of time varies with lived conditions and affective states.

In 2024, Fernanda Bueno, Anna Nobre, and Cravo showed with EEG that physically identical intervals may involve partially different temporal processes depending on what the participant needs to do with them.

Science does not demonstrate our 5D mechanism.

But it allows us to ask:

if we change what continuously occupies attention and anticipation, will we also change the experience of available time?

Perhaps We Need Time to Leave Our Local Optima

Extended Yãy hã mĩy helps us again.

We learn through repetition so that we do not need to discover everything from the beginning each time.

But a post-work society may also need to make the opposite movement:

to have enough time to rediscover what repetition stopped allowing us to perceive.

Machines may free us from part of work.

Citizen Drex may free us from part of economic urgency.

Biome Income may free us from the need to produce excess.

But only perceiving our own local optima may begin to free us from the forms of Being we learned to repeat.

And Then Transcendence Appears

What do we do when survival no longer occupies almost all our movements?

Here Neuroscience, Politics, and Religion finally meet.

Brazilian researchers José Mauricio de Carvalho and Alexander Moreira-Almeida revisited Viktor Frankl in 2024 to discuss existential meaning, spirituality, and what Frankl called the spiritual unconscious.

The noetic dimension in Frankl does not require adherence to one specific institutional religion.

BrainLatam proposes a:

Secular Transcendence

Not a state religion.

Not compulsory atheism.

Not imposed syncretism.

But conditions in which each Body-Territory can find its own language of transcendence.

God.

Ancestry.

Nature.

Art.

Science.

Community.

Silence.

Or no religious formulation at all.

Transcendence does not require destroying our local optima. It requires being able to perceive them as local.

Free Time Needs to Go Beyond the Imagination We Received

Even our imagination has been learned.

We imagine the future using words, images, and possibilities we have encountered.

Ailton Krenak, in Ancestral Future (2022), confronts the idea of humanity as separate from the living world.

Antônio Bispo dos Santos, in A terra dá, a terra quer (2023), develops the idea of confluence and criticizes forms of existence organized primarily through commodification and utility, proposing relations in which differences can coexist without becoming identical.

Perhaps free time should serve precisely to:

imagine beyond the imagination we inherited.

A restored river.

A larger forest.

Less isolated elderly people.

Children playing without turning everything into performance.

Art without the obligation to monetize.

Open science.

Time for another Being.

Time for the biome.

Time to ask.

Where Will the Liberated Attention Go?

That is the central question of Blog 12.

Politics can create material conditions.

Economics can stop requiring growth based on excess.

AI can return time.

Education can increase emotional differentiation.

Technology can expand perception.

Religion can offer languages of transcendence.

But none of them should answer:

who you must Be.

Because:

Body-Territory is our unit of Being.

And:

We cut things apart to learn, not to Be.

If machines give us back time, our responsibility will not only be to prevent someone from simply occupying it again.

It will be something larger:

to create conditions in which each Body-Territory can encounter perceptions it has never had, transcend its own local optima, and use recovered time to make itself, other Beings, and the biome of which it remains a part more possible.

Main References

ILO; WORLD BANK (2024). Buffer or Bottleneck? Employment Exposure to Generative AI and the Digital Divide in Latin America. ILO Working Paper 121.
Estimates Latin American occupational exposure to generative AI and shows that technological transformation, infrastructure, and inequality need to be considered together.

ECLAC; CENIA (2025/2026). Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index 2025.
Provides the latest regional overview of AI adoption, capabilities, governance, and inequalities across 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries.

VALENZUELA, S. (2024). Cuando los algoritmos son editores: Cómo las redes sociales, la IA y la desinformación alteran el consumo de noticias. Comunicación y Medios, 33(49), 186–191. DOI: 10.5354/0719-1529.2024.74976.
The Chilean researcher discusses how algorithms increasingly participate in editorial functions and in defining what gains visibility within the informational territory.

SALCEDO-DE-LA-FUENTE, R. et al. (2024). Las emociones en el proceso de aprendizaje: revisión sistemática. Revista de Estudios y Experiencias en Educación, 23(51), 253–271.
Chilean researchers highlight the role of emotions in learning and provide a basis for treating emotional education as part of a society oriented less toward repetition and more toward differentiation.

CRAVO, A. M. et al. (2022). Time experience during social distancing: A longitudinal study during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Science Advances, 8, eabj7205.
Shows, by following thousands of Brazilians, that the subjective passage of time relates to lived and affective conditions.

BUENO, F. D.; NOBRE, A. C.; CRAVO, A. M. (2024). Time for What? Dissociating Explicit Timing Tasks through Electrophysiological Signatures. eNeuro, 11(2). DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0351-23.2023.
Shows that identical physical intervals may involve shared and task-dependent neural processes, providing dialogue with the BrainLatam hypothesis that lived time depends on the dynamics of what is being represented.

CARVALHO, J. M.; MOREIRA-ALMEIDA, A. (2024). Existential meaning, spiritual unconscious and spirituality in Viktor Frankl. Journal of Religion and Health, 63, 31–45. DOI: 10.1007/s10943-023-01902-8.
Brazilian researchers revisit Frankl to discuss meaning and spirituality without reducing the noetic dimension to institutional religious adherence.

ARIAS-HIDALGO, D. (2023). Perspective décoloniale pour penser le tourisme à Abya Yala: une approche de la notion bribri de “buen vivir”. Téoros, 42(1).
The Costa Rican researcher develops a decolonial perspective in dialogue with a Bribri notion of buen vivir, serving as inspiration — not equivalence — for BrainLatam’s Bribri Prosperity.

ARROYO ARAYA, H. (2024). Sobre la noción de sufrimiento en la población indígena Bribri. Revista Reflexiones, 103(2).
Research conducted in articulation with Bribri organizations shows relationships among individual experience, collectivity, and spatial-temporal order, providing a counterpoint to models that isolate the individual from territorial relations.

OSPINA-MATEUS, H. et al. (2023). Analysis in circular economy research in Latin America: A bibliometric review. Heliyon, 9, e19999.
Colombian researchers show the growth of circular economy as a Latin American field seeking alternatives to linear models of extraction, production, and disposal.

MAXAKALI, I.; MAXAKALI, S. and collaborators (2023). Works on Tikmũ’ũn memory, territory, and records; continuity of the concept Yãy hã mĩy presented in the Mundos Indígenas exhibition, UFMG.
Isael and Sueli Maxakali present Yãy hã mĩy through Tikmũ’ũn transformation and relationality; the Extended Yãy hã mĩy used in this blog is explicitly a BrainLatam extrapolation, not a neuroscientific translation of the Indigenous concept.

KRENAK, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras.
Offers a contemporary Indigenous perspective that questions the separation between humanity and the living world and expands what we can imagine as a future.

BISPO DOS SANTOS, A. (2023). A terra dá, a terra quer. Ubu Editora/Piseagrama.
Develops confluence, counter-colonization, and circularity as ways of thinking about relationships with land and other living beings beyond the commodification of existence.

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL (2025–2026). Drex / Drex Pilot.
Documents the official infrastructure currently under development by the Central Bank; Daily Citizen Drex and Biome Income remain BrainLatam conceptual proposals.

BrainLatam (2026). Extended Yãy hã mĩy.
A hypothesis of embodied learning based on imitation, repetition, incorporation, and the later possibility of transcending the learned repertoire.

BrainLatam (2026). Local Optima — When a Belief Works Too Well.
Uses the local optimum as a metaphor for efficient repertoires that may interrupt exploration of alternatives and transform a useful solution into perceptual reduction.

BrainLatam (2026). Bribri Prosperity.
Defines prosperity as increasing the possibility of life for the Body-Territory and the biome through value production, circularity, and minimal excess, without presenting this formulation as an official Bribri concept.

BrainLatam (2026). Attention Sovereignty.
Proposes that freedom in a post-work society should mean more than having available hours: it should preserve the capacity of each Body-Territory to encounter differences that State, market, religion, or algorithms have not already selected in advance.