The Other Way AI Impairs Our Thinking

AI’s tendency to erode our attention spans has been clear for some time.

Letting the technology shoulder the burden of thought atrophies our ability to sustain mental effort.

I see this all of the time in the undergrads I teach.

The remedy, as I tell them, is to embrace exertion and keep our cognitive muscles active.

But suddenly, AI has started sapping people’s concentration in a new way, one that feels much harder to combat.

In the past week, consulting virtually any major news source —not to mention social media—has meant confronting the prospect of an AI apocalypse.

Using AI has already diminished many people’s capacity to focus, work, and think; worrying about AI is making the problem worse.

I’m no exception.

The tipping point came on September 8.

That evening, a young researcher named Jacob Coxon posted on X about his decision to quit his job at Anthropic.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI, where he’d also worked, are “gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote.

Their models “will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” he continued.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Perhaps even more alarming, one of Anthropic’s top safety researchers concurred.

“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger wrote on X.