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.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Review

Books

Culture

Politics

9 April 2025

4 min read

Is it OK to pray for the death of a dictator?

What happens when the mighty lose their thrones.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Bullet holes on a wall and white paint outlines mark the site of an execution

The wall where Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were executed.

NPR.

The end, when it comes, can be nasty, brutish and filmed.

Muammar Gaddafi, self-styled Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, spent the last moments of his life cowering in a Libyan sewer after an air strike on his convoy. On discovery, a mob subjected him to some ghastly final abuses before death – the kind of ending he had mercilessly condemned thousands to. It was almost biblical in its parabola, and it was recorded on a wobbly camera.

But it was not the first of its kind in this generation. On Christmas Day 1989, the disfigured face of Nicolae Ceausescu was broadcast on TV following his summary execution by hastily assembled opposition forces in Romania. Only days previously, he had been an unassailable dictator.

Vladimir Putin has spoken about Gaddafi’s ending, and it clearly troubles him, but perhaps Ceausescu’s death is lodged in the dark recesses of his mind because it was the one bloody end of all the communist leaders of eastern Europe.

Being a dictator is an all-consuming job. Too many domestic and foreign enemies are made along the way for the dictator to drop their vigilance. And their downfall often comes at the hands of those closest to them; by definition, these people know the dictator’s movements and weaknesses better than others and are best placed to exploit them. The military must be equipped to suppress dissent, but give it too much power and the generals pose a risk to the dictator. Yet if the military lacks the hardware, control of the population becomes harder. Many dictators surround themselves with specially trained loyal guards to defend against the military, but the rule of terror means no-one speaks the honest truth and so risks appear everywhere. No wonder dictators are usually paranoid and themselves racked with the fear that a culture of capricious violence induces in everyone.

These and other theories are explored by Marcel Dirsus in his compelling book How Tyrants Fall (John Murray, 2025). Dirsus notes how dictators require money, weapons and people to survive in office and for the elites around them to believe these goods will remain in place. They also need to immerse the surrounding elites in blood guilt, so that their fate becomes entwined with the dictator’s; Saddam Hussein compelled others to join him in the murder and execution of opponents.

For Dirsus, there are two ways to topple a tyrant. The most direct is to take them out, but this is rarely straightforward. Coup attempts are often shambolic in their planning and even well-orchestrated ones usually fail; the consequences for those implicated are always horrendous. The second route is patient and pragmatic, looking to weaken the tyrant, strengthen alternative elites and empower the masses. External powers often have minimal influence unless, like the US in Iraq, the country is invaded and the tyrant deposed. Sanctions often fail to hurt the elites; a state’s geographic proximity to the tyrant’s nation can be useful, as it gives a base from which opponents of the regime can work.

Modern technology is changing the face of political action, making it easier for large groups to mobilise against regimes, as seen in the short-lived Arab Spring. It also enables dictators to track opponents more successfully than even the feared Stasi in East Germany. Right now, it feels like the tyrants are ahead in this game.

Shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a friend said to me that he was praying for Putin’s death or downfall. I asked him how sure he was that the person who replaced Putin would be better. If the pragmatic route for toppling a dictator involves strengthening different elites and empowering the masses, the likelihood is that the elites will take over, not the masses. Dictators never allow the components of civil society to form; democratic institutions take decades to build. And they rarely anoint successors in advance, for fear alternative power bases are created. When dictators fall, it usually leads to initial chaos and violence before another elite can establish itself from which a new dictator will emerge.

In her inspired song of praise at the news she would give birth to the long-awaited Messiah, Mary observes how God ‘has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly’. It is a role reversal typical of St Luke, recorder of Mary’s song, a gift of eschatology many want realised today, not just in the world to come. When the powerful are brought down from their throne today, they are typically replaced by the next most powerful person, and if the throne remains vacant or is contested, what follows often feels like the spirit that went out of a person in Matthew Gospel returning with seven other spirits more evil than itself, meaning ‘the last state of person is worse than the first’.

This need not be a counsel of despair, but a call to informed intercessory prayer which is short on controlling advice for God’s geo-political strategy, and long on the wisdom and patience of the one throne that endures.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.
If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.
Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Make a gift