Attention Is All You Need: Humans and Computers in the Time of Neural NetworksThis chapter in Scenes of Attention, edited by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E.H. Smith, compares two contemporary uses of attention: in popular critiques of the software industry, which try to defend human attention, and in AI architectures like GPT, which are built around novel “attention mechanisms.” The differences between these two uses of attention suggest that the concept is functioning as a cultural key symbol, rather than referring to an objective mental capacity.