Article

Attention

Culture

19 February 2025

5 min read

Will AI’s attentions amplify or suffocate us?

Keeping attention on the right things has always been a problem.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

A cute-looking robot with big eyes stares up at the viewer.

Robots - always cuter than AI.

Alex Knight on Unsplash.

Taking inspiration from human attention has made AI vastly more powerful. Can this focus our minds on why attention really matters?

Artificial intelligence has been developing at a dizzying rate. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot can automate everyday tasks and can effortlessly summarise information. Photorealistic images and videos can be generated from a couple of words and medical AI promises to revolutionise both drug discovery and healthcare. The technology (or at least the hype around it) gives an impression of boundless acceleration.

So far, 2025 has been the year AI has become a real big-ticket political item. The new Trump administration has promised half a trillion dollars for AI infrastructure and UK prime minister Keir Starmer plans to ‘turbocharge’ AI in the UK. Predictions of our future with this new technology range from doom-laden apocalypse to techno-utopian superabundance. The only certainty is that it will lead to dramatic personal and social change.

This technological impact feels even more dramatic given the relative simplicity of its components. Huge volumes of text, image and videos are converted into vast arrays of numbers. These grids are then pushed through repeated processes of addition, multiplication and comparison. As more data is fed into this process, the numbers (or weights) in the system are updated and the AI ‘learns’ from the data. With enough data, meaningful relationships between words are internalised and the model becomes capable of generating useful answers to questions.

So why have these algorithms become so much more powerful over the past few years? One major driver has been to take inspiration from human attention. An ‘attention mechanism’ allows very distant parts of texts or images to be associated together. This means that when processing a passage of conversation in a novel, the system is able to take cues on the mood of the characters from earlier in the chapter. This ability to attend to the broader context of the text has allowed the success of the current wave of ‘large language models’ or ‘generative AI’. In fact, these models with the technical name ‘Transformer’ were developed by removing other features and concentrating only on the attention mechanisms. This was first published in the memorably named ‘Attention is All You Need’ paper written by scientists working at Google in 2017.

If you’re wondering whether this machine replication of human attention has much to do with the real thing, you might be right to be sceptical. That said, this attention-imitating technology has profound effects on how we attend to the world. On the one hand, it has shown the ability to focus and amplify our attention, but on the other, to distract and suffocate it.

Attention is a moral act, directed towards care for others.

A radiologist acts with professional care for her patients. Armed with a lifetime of knowledge and expertise, she diligently checks scans for evidence of malignant tumours. Using new AI tools can amplify her expertise and attention. These can automatically detect suspicious patterns in the image including very fine detail that a human eye could miss. These additional pairs of eyes can free her professional attention to other aspects of the scan or other aspects of the job.

Meanwhile, a government acts with obligations to keep its spending down. It decides to automate welfare claim handling using a “state of the art” AI system. The system flags more claimants as being overpaid than the human employees used to. The politicians and senior bureaucrats congratulate themselves on the system’s efficiency and they resolve to extend it to other types of payments. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands are being forced to pay non-existent debts. With echoes of the British Post Office Horizon Scandal, the 2017-2020 the Australian Robo-debt scandal was due to flaws in the algorithm used to calculate the debts. To have a properly functioning welfare safety net, there needs to be public scrutiny, and a misplaced deference to machines and algorithms suffocated the attention that was needed.

These examples illustrate the interplay between AI and our attention, but they also show that human attention has a broader meaning than just being the efficient channelling of information. In both cases, attention is a moral act, directed towards care for others. There are many other ways algorithms interact with our attention – how social media is optimised to keep us scrolling, how chatbots are being touted as a solution to loneliness among the elderly, but also how translation apps help break language barriers.

Algorithms are not the first thing to get in the way of our attention, and keeping our attention on the right things has always been a problem. One of the best stories about attention and noticing other people is Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. A man lies badly beaten on the side of the road after a robbery. Several respectable people walk past without attending to the man. A stranger stops. His people and the injured man’s people are bitter enemies. Despite this, he generously attends to the wounded stranger. He risks the danger of stopping – perhaps the injured man will attack him? He then tends the man’s wounds and uses his money to pay for an indefinite stay in a hotel.

This is the true model of attention. Risky, loving “noticing” which is action as much as intellect. A model of attention better than even the best neuroscientist or programmer could come up with, one modelled by God himself. In this story, the stranger, the Good Samaritan, is Jesus, and we all sit wounded and in need of attention.

But not only this, we are born to imitate the Good Samaritan’s attention to others. Just as we can receive God’s love, we can also attend to the needs of others. This mirrors our relationship to artificial intelligence, just as our AI toys are conduits of our attention, we can be conduits of God’s perfect loving attention. This is what our attention is really for, and if we remember this while being prudent about the dangers of technology, then we might succeed in elevating our attention-inspired tools to make AI an amplifier of real attention.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.