AI Is Frying Our Brains! We’re Producing More. Thinking Less
Researchers interviewed hundreds of full-time American workers and found they’re suffering from something new called AI brain fry. Fried brain from Artificial Intelligence!
AI makes individual tasks faster. What used to take three hours now takes 45 minutes. But the days get harder. When each task takes less time, you don’t do fewer tasks, you do more. Our apparent capacity expands, the work expands to fill it. Managers see output growing and expectations rise.
Before AI, you’d spend a whole day on one design problem. Sketch on paper, think in the shower, go for a walk, come back with clarity. One problem, one day. Today that one problem becomes six, and each one “only takes an hour with AI.” But context-switching six times is brutally expensive for the human brain. AI doesn’t get tired between problems. We do.
Before AI, the job was: think, produce, test, ship. You were the creator. After AI, the job became: write a prompt, wait, read output, evaluate it, decide if it’s correct, fix what doesn’t work, repeat. You became a reviewer, a judge, an inspector on an assembly line that never stops.
People who use AI intensively spend 14% more mental energy at work, accumulate 12% more cognitive fatigue, face 19% more information overload. People in a state of AI brain fry make 33% more decisions while exhausted, make serious errors 39% more often, and are 39% more likely to want to quit. We’re burning out the people who use the tools most, the ones companies depend on most.
Use it to free yourself from the useless and you perform better. Use it to do as many things as possible in the least amount of time and you burn out.
Using AI to free up time, then filling that time with more work, isn’t productivity. It’s running on a treadmill that never stops and it fries our brains. What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC