tech
April 11, 2026
AI is making us faster, more productive, and worse at thinking
AI is everywhere, the pressure to adopt it is relentless, and the evidence that it’s making us smarter is getting thinner by the quarter.
TL;DR
- An open-source platform called Gas Town allows users to orchestrate AI coding agents simultaneously, increasing software assembly speed.
- Interacting with AI systems can lead to increased exhaustion, anxiety, and a reduced ability to think clearly.
- The pressure to adopt AI is pervasive, driven by marketing language rather than concrete reality.
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that AI needs to deliver tangible benefits to maintain public support for its energy consumption.
- A significant percentage of US consumers do not want AI on their devices, stating they do not need it.
- Economic analyses have found no meaningful economy-wide relationship between AI adoption and productivity.
- Real productivity improvements from AI are narrow, primarily in customer support and software development.
- AI adoption can intensify workloads, leading to "workload creep" and "AI brain fry" characterized by mental fog and difficulty concentrating.
- Enthusiastic adopters and entry-level workers report higher rates of AI-related burnout.
- The term "artificial intelligence" has been used ideologically since its inception, conflating computation with cognition and speed with wisdom.
- AI systems excel at statistical prediction and pattern recognition, not intelligence in the human sense of judgment and reflection.
- The AI economy may be eroding conditions essential for human intelligence, such as uninterrupted attention and tolerance for ambiguity.
- The manufactured urgency around AI narrows democratic deliberation, collapsing the future into an inevitability.
- The most common reason given by consumers for not wanting AI is simply that they do not need it.
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