If Attention Is All We Need, Then Why Are We Looking in the Wrong Direction?

It's been a while sine I posted. Mostly due to the overwhelm I've been feeling as I watch my fellow Americans under attack. I feel like I should be DOING something, speaking up, helping.....but I know that the best way that I can support my country is by ensuring that my nervous system is regulated and that I am open to collaborating and being creative at this time of need. And by sitting in the quiet something occurred to me.

Image Credit: AI for Social Good, NYU Abu Dhabi

A few years ago, some of the brightest minds in technology declared that attention is all we need. The phrase became a mantra, a meme, a foundational truth for modern AI. Entire fortunes have been built on this phrase and even more ecosystems optimized around it.

Looking at the state of the world today with it's rising inequality, accelerating climate collapse, food insecurity, mass displacement I began to ask my loved ones

If attention is all we need, why isn’t it being directed toward the things that actually matter?

To me it feels obvious that we are not suffering from a lack of intelligence. What we are suffering from is a lack of intention.We have models that can write poetry, pass medical exams, generate photo-realistic worlds, and optimize global logistics. We have capital flowing faster than at any point in tech history. We have unprecedented computational power but we are missing collective focus.

Our AI ecosystem is locked in an ouroboros of optimization. We want better ads, better engagement loops, better prediction of consumer behavior. Attention is harvested, monetized and extracted.

Meanwhile, poverty is still framed as an economic inevitability instead of a design failure.Climate change is still treated like a future problem instead of a present systems bug. Food scarcity persists because we won't prioritize modeling equitable supply chains. This is a values gap. It has nothing to do with our capabilities.

If you are a world-class researcher, engineer, founder, or investor, I'm speaking directly to you. Riddle me this. What would happen if even 10% of frontier AI talent focused on climate adaptation, poverty alleviation or food resilience. What if “state-of-the-art” was measured by lives materially improved?

Personally I'm tired of demos that are designed to impress other technologists. I want to see deployment and solutions that serve actual humans. Let's kill the feel good prizes and hackathon efforts. This requires real funding. It needs long-term, patient, mission-aligned capital that understands that AI for Good is civilization maintenance.

Hyperscalers have shown us what’s possible when ambition meets resources. Now imagine that same ambition fully aimed at planetary-scale problems with accountability baked in.

Let me be very clear "AI for Good" is not a branding exercise and using AI creatively is not a “nice-to-have” once the real money is made This is the actual work.

I talk a lot about de-centering humans. By considering ourselves to be a part of a larger ecosystem we may be able to move beyond our short-term incentives and narrow definitions of success. When we stop designing AI solely to mirror our worst impulses (greed, dominance, extraction), we create space for something wiser to emerge.

When AI is approached from a creative lens it has the potential to help us model regenerative economies, design climate-resilient cities, predict and prevent food shortages, and re-imagine education and work in ways that restore dignity and purpose. But only if we choose to pay attention.

If attention is all we need, then attention is exactly what I’m asking for. From researchers: aim higher. From founders: build braver. From investors: fund the future you actually want to live in. History won’t remember how clever our models were. It will remember what we did with them.

For certain AI can help solve global challenges. The question is whether the people with the most power in this field are willing to look up from the mirror and look out at the world.

Let’s direct our attention accordingly.