Attention Is All We Have Left

Years ago, a research paper titled Attention Is All You Need1 proposed giving machines a way to understand the world. It described how algorithms could weigh the importance of every word in a sentence, holding context and meaning at once. That mechanism became the foundation of modern AI.

In a strange symmetry, we’ve ceded our own attention and subsequent ability to empathize, ideate and innovate in an ironic see-saw during the same period.

Our attention has become raw material. Every scroll is a tithe paid to systems designed to keep us reactive. The Matrix analogy is almost too on-the-nose. The irony is that while machines gained attention as their organizing principle, ours has been slowly fragmented into rage, presumption, self-soothing and metrics.

You can see it in how people read and react now. How we scan for certainty instead of substance. Every influencer on every platform rushes to push out a take on whatever is in the news right now with little nuance and predictable opinions based on their channel theme, political party or affiliation. We’ve replaced discernment with performative theater.

Machines were given attention to understand. We’ve been giving ours away to forget and soothe the cortical beast that favors less work, presumably to save energy for spotting a sabre-tooth tiger or something (it’s been many years since I studied biological anthropology).

We open our phones to check one message and fall into an hour of curated distraction. You doom-scroll through fear about AI replacing jobs, pausing only long enough to share an opinion we didn’t have ten minutes ago. We convince ourselves it’s research.

I’ve watched teams confuse information density for intelligence. Executives brag about dashboards with a hundred metrics but can’t name which ones matter. People say they want insight, but what they really want is the comfort of numbers that confirm their assumptions.

Social media platforms don’t sell content; they sell micro-states of outrage and validation. They train our nervous systems to seek stimulus over stillness. Every scroll delivers narrative custom engineered to our own prejudices and preferences either to incite or soothe our primal brain in an endless buffet of certainty disguised as relevance.

The strangest part is that many of us know it. We sense that something is wrong, that we’re performing intelligence instead of practicing it. But awareness alone doesn’t break the loop; it just adds another layer of guilt.

In nearly every transformation I’ve led, progress began the moment someone said, I don’t know. I can’t tell you how excited I’ve been the few times we’ve stared a failed project in the face and instead of lament decided intentionally to learn from it.

New initiatives often start with solutions or at least use them as jumpoffs to discovery. The real work starts when we realize presumed clarity is a bottleneck.

AI can’t hold uncertainty. It pattern-matches from what it’s seen, collapsing ambiguity into probability. But the world still runs on friction and anomaly, breaking muscle fiber is the path to earned strength.

We would do well to foster in our teams a willingness to remain in tension long enough for new information to arrive. Complexity can’t be conquered, only observed and navigated to find the best path forward whether that means deleting, combining, reordering, or automating. The discomfort we feel when a question has no immediate answer is data as well as opportunity to let new ideas or opinions flow in and help steer the ship toward a new port.

I once watched a client discover that a process problem wasn’t a system flaw but a story people were repeating. They’d built workarounds around an outdated assumption. It took sitting in uncertainty before the truth surfaced. It required human patience, ambiguity, attention and most of all seeking contradictory information.

No AI could have done that….at least not yet.

Cultivated uncertainty is the last remaining frontier where human judgment outperforms the machine.

The challenge now isn’t information scarcity but signal contamination. The rise of generative AI means every artifact and data point we consume could be synthetic, and every day this becomes more the case.

The people who navigate this era won’t be those who memorize AI jargon but those who notice when they’re being emotionally managed. Critical thinking demands friction. It asks us to slow down when everything in our digital environment tells us to speed up.

Why are you slowing down when you already have the definitive answer after seconds of a robot thinking for you?

Machines don’t have an immune system. They ingest everything. We do. But most of us have suppressed ours for comfort.

There’s no secret formula, just small disciplines that return you to yourself.

An attention audit: At random points in the day, ask, Where is my attention right now?

Friction as compass: Notice when something feels uncomfortable, contradictory, or unclear. Don’t rush past it. Sit with it until you can name why. The discomfort is signal—an invitation to learn where your assumptions live.

The question loop:

Simple questions, repeated often, sharpen perception more than any productivity app ever will.

Attention and uncertainty work together. The more attention we reclaim, the more uncertainty we can tolerate. The more uncertainty we can tolerate, the deeper our attention and judgement becomes.

It’s a loop worth staying inside, or, as Usher once sang, let it burn..

The real fear is that AI will take our meaning. We all experience it, some who are extremely bullish on AGI may disagree but I’d challenge them to think it through until they reach the inevitable conclusion that no amount of money or power can keep anybody relevant in an era of machine superintelligence.

The only path forward is to avoid the anesthesia (or the blue pill if you must). We could spend the rest of our lives mistaking activity for awareness, scrolling for truth that never arrives. Or we could stop long enough to feel the weight of our own thoughts and uncertainty pressing back against the noise.

There is no resolution here. No checklist for reclaiming humanity.

You’ll want one (I know I do), but that’s the reflex of the mind searching for completion to avoid that pesky dissonance mentioned above.

But that desire for resolution is the very system we’re talking about.

So pause. Just notice the space between this sentence and your next thought.

That’s where our attention lives.

It’s all we have left.