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

Film & TV

Trauma

5 June 2025

5 min read

This bad TV version of The Last of Us ruins much more than storytelling

Following up the acclaimed video game doesn't deliver prestige viewing.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A pensive looking woman glances to the side.

Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey.

HBO.

What’s the point of the TV adaptation of The Last of Us?

Throughout its second series, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this question. I’m still short of an answer.

Turning the two The Last of Us video games into prestige TV was always going to be problematic, because those video games already were prestige TV. You just had to press buttons on a controller now and then.

The first The Last of Us video game is regularly included in lists of the best video games ever, and it’s not because of any ground-breaking gameplay or because of any technological advancements it made. It’s because of its story.

It is richly character-focussed, gritty, realistic, and utterly human. The Last of Us Part I (as it’s now known) carries the kind of gravitas and emotional complexity you might expect from the likes of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Chernobyl, or The West Wing. It’s already prestige TV.

So, is the TV adaptation simply an attempt to make this same story accessible to people who don’t play video games? Maybe. That would make sense, were it not for its deeply frustrating second series, the finale of which has just aired.

The Last of Us Part II was massively controversial when it released in 2020. (WARNING: absolutely colossal spoilers ahead, for both the games and the TV show). Joel – the main protagonist of the first game – is abruptly and brutally murdered in its opening act. This leads Ellie – his pseudo-surrogate-daughter – to hunt down those responsible in attempt to enact a reckoning.

In the video game, most of the story is told over the course of three days. First, from Ellie’s perspective, then from the perspective of Abby, Joel’s killer. In the TV show, the second series covers Ellie’s side of the story before very abruptly shifting to Abby’s side in the final seconds, leaving the viewers with a cliffhanger. Even as someone who’s played the game and knows what’s going to happen, it felt like a bit of a slap in the face.

But for someone who hasn’t played the games it must be bordering on nonsensical. Even spread over two series, the story is so truncated, and so much is left unsaid. I can’t imagine making sense of this series without having played the video game first. But the TV show is basically just a live action remake of the game. Which again begs the question: what’s the point of the TV adaptation of The Last of Us?

I’ve found this series, and the video game it’s based off, hugely frustrating. Because it’s trying to convey an important message. But both the game and the show contrive to undermine their important central ideas through poor storytelling techniques and structures.

But in making clear what was left unsaid in the game, the power of the moment is undercut. Much is spoken; little is said.

Let’s take one example. Half-way through the game (or towards the end of series 2), Ellie has tracked down and tortured one of Abby’s friends for information on her whereabouts. Afterwards, she talks to her lover Dina about what happened.

In the game, it’s harrowing. Ellie is visibly shaken by what she’s just witnessed herself do. “I made her talk.” She says. And then to Dina: “I don’t want to lose you.” “Good,” comes Dina’s reply. And that’s it. Cut to black. Little is spoken; much is said.

But where the scenes last about 30 seconds in the game, in the TV show it’s over five minutes long. “I made her talk. I thought it would be harder to do, but it wasn’t. It was easy. I just kept hurting her.” So says Ellie, halfway through the conversation. The writers are clearly trying to make explicit Ellie’s fear that she’s losing herself, and Dina by extension, in her thirst for revenge. But in making clear what was left unsaid in the game, the power of the moment is undercut. Much is spoken; little is said.

“I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards,” Garth Marenghi once said. I can only assume he writes for HBO now.

It’s a shame the scene gets fluffed as badly as it does, because really it’s the centrepiece of the narrative. Faced with unthinkable violence, Ellie chooses to repay the act in kind. But, in hunting down and torturing those responsible, ultimately Ellie finds herself becoming less and less human with each act of revenge. Here, in this conversation with Dina, Ellie begins to glimpse the reality of this. That acts of violence towards others are ultimately also acts of violence towards her own nature.

This is, as it turns out, a deeply Christian notion. Where other Ancient Near Eastern creation myths depict their gods as creating the world through violent and bloody struggle, in Genesis God merely speaks life into being. Where Jesus’ disciples would violently overthrow their Roman oppressors, he instead says “those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

Moreover, Jesus’ death by crucifixion was unspeakably cruel and violent, encompassing protracted public humiliation, sexual abuse, and mutilation. It is here that Christ draws the suffering of the world to himself, that we might be given the opportunity to live free from the ongoing cycle of violence that surrounds us. Not that we might avoid having violence done to us, but that we might find the strength not to be violent in turn.

And this is the ultimate paradox at the centre of Christianity: that the greatest show of strength the world has ever seen is found in Christ’s being nailed to a tree.

Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence. That’s the message of The Last of Us Part II; albeit one conveyed in a rather ham-fisted way. While I’m not optimistic, I hope the next series of the TV show manages to fix the game’s wobbly narrative structure to convey this in a way that is nuanced and compelling. Because it’s a message we desperately need to hear.

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