AI’s biggest challenge isn’t accuracy or ethics. It’s attention. Instead of freeing us to think more clearly, today’s AI tools are fighting for our focus.
Competing for Attention
I opened Gmail in Google Workspace this morning and got a pop-up ad for one of their AI related products. This is in addition to the ever-present AI ads that often sit right at the top of the inbox. What used to be a quiet inbox now has a banner inviting me to let artificial intelligence help me write a message just about every day. It reminded me how quickly the AI revolution feels like just another advertising campaign.
Welcome to the (possible) AI bubble. Instead of freeing up attention, AI is competing for it.
When I first got online around 1990, the Internet felt like a frontier, full of discovery and experimentation. Such a sense of possibility. Then came the web with banner ads, analytics, and the rise of metrics and cookies to measure every click. It was no longer about connecting ideas but about capturing attention. Now AI is going through the same cycle, only faster. The moment a new capability appears, it’s becomes a sales feature.
Since then, we’ve spent decades building the pattern recognition and predicting systems that understand and generate language. But when the first large-scale use of that power is to help people write ad copy faster to nudge them toward products, it’s hard not to wonder what we’re doing with this new intelligence when so much of it ends up serving the same old purposes.
Opportunity Allocation
The real opportunity for AI isn’t automation. It’s allocation. Where do we want our intelligence to be focused? What problems deserve that kind of attention? Which kinds of work are actually worth amplifying? It deserves more thought than simply throwing a chatbot at anything that moves.
There’s certainly good work being done in fields like healthcare, transportation, and automation. But online, most of the effort seems to be going into convenience. AI writes emails, organizes schedules, and summarizes meetings. That’s fine, but those are small gains. The bigger potential is in helping us understand complex systems. To learn more quickly and to make better decisions. In my world of web development, that might mean tools to analyze how people actually use information instead of just how they click on it. For finance and investing, it could mean systems that help separate short term noise from long term signal. Creatively, it might mean software that helps us deeply explore ideas rather than just finishing drafts more quickly.
That kind of development takes patience and direction. It doesn’t happen when every company is racing to attach “AI integration” to their products just to keep pace with the competition. Most of these integrations will be quickly forgotten because they don’t solve real problems, they just follow the quick hit.
Maybe the more interesting work will come later from people who are willing to step back and ask what’s actually useful. Maybe it will be AI that helps small businesses make sense of data without having to hire analysts. Or that helps people learn finance through personalized simulation. Areas where intelligence actually adds value.
Consumer Trust
There’s also the bigger issue of trust. When everything around us is labeled “AI powered,” the name stops meaning anything. We start to tune it out, just like we’ve done with banner ads. Real progress will depend on credibility, not sloganeering. The next phase of AI needs fewer press releases and more results that people and businesses feel in everyday life.
I’m not trying to be cynical, just skeptical of how AI is being used. We finally have tools that can process information at a scale we couldn’t imagine even ten years ago and it would be a shame if all that potential is spent on making slightly better marketing systems.
Maybe the next wave of work in this field will be quieter and more deliberate. Less about automation and more about understanding. Less about adding features and more about finding meaning. There has to be something better than yet another ad campaign.
