A few months ago, someone asked me what AI even is. For a second, I wasn't sure I'd heard the question right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I show someone a photo and mention it was made with artificial intelligence, and their face goes, for a moment, completely blank. I send someone an article in a language they don't speak, and they ask me how they're supposed to read it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At first I thought this was about being left behind. That some people simply hadn't kept up. But the more I sit with it, the less true that feels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I notice the same thing in conversations, not just in front of a screen. Someone starts telling me something important, and after a few minutes, the reflex shows up \u2014 theirs, mine, it doesn't matter whose: can you sum it up?<\/em> Not because I'm not interested in the other person. It's that the mind has started demanding the same rhythm it's grown used to on a screen. Everything has to arrive quickly at a conclusion. Except life, unlike a feed, doesn't work in summaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I see pieces of the same thing in my work with people. Someone sits, for the first time in a long while, in a few seconds of silence \u2014 and grows restless. Not from impatience. From lack of practice. Their body hasn't stayed, in a very long time, in the same place in the mind long enough to see what's actually there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don't think, in the end, that what I'm seeing in all these people is ignorance. I think it's exhaustion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We've grown used to talking about scrolling as a cause \u2014 as if the phone itself were what broke our minds. I think the truth is more complicated: scrolling doesn't create the emptiness on its own, but it can maintain it very efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Very few people end up scrolling for hours because they're superficial. They end up there because they're tired, lonely, anxious, out of the energy needed for anything else \u2014 and the brain, in a state of exhaustion, reaches for the cheapest reward it can find. Scrolling fills that emptiness, temporarily, with something that costs nothing in effort and asks nothing in presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That changes the whole conversation, I think. This isn't about weak people up against a powerful technology. It's about exhausted people, meeting a technology built exactly to profit from that exhaustion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Few people know that infinite scroll didn't happen by accident. It was invented \u2014 by Aza Raskin, in 2006<\/a> \u2014 as a design solution. He himself has since said, more than once, how much he regrets it, noting that thousands of hours of human life were simply absorbed by a feature he built in a single afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What infinite scroll actually does is remove one essential moment: the one where the brain receives the signal I'm done<\/em>. In the past, a book closed. A newspaper ended. A film reached its final scene. Every form of content had an edge, and that edge handed you back, for a moment, your own decision: keep going, or stop? Infinite scroll has no edge. There's no last screen. There's only the next one, and the next, and the next \u2014 and the decision to stop slowly becomes the one thing you have to actively choose, against a system built precisely to postpone it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The economist Herbert Simon<\/a> wrote, back in 1971 \u2014 long before the internet, Facebook, or TikTok existed \u2014 a sentence that reads as almost prophetic: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.<\/strong><\/em> He'd already grasped the basic mechanism we're now living at a scale he couldn't have imagined. Information has become, essentially, free and infinite. Our attention \u2014 a biological resource, finite, genuinely capable of running out \u2014 has remained the only scarce thing left. And for the first time in history, we're not just competing with other people for it. We're competing with systems built specifically to win it more efficiently than our own minds can defend it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It isn't just our attention that gets fragmented. The criteria by which we decide what deserves our attention in the first place are changing too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I once wrote that algorithms have simply learned to love hierarchies more efficiently than we do. I think I'm only now grasping the full weight of that sentence. Because algorithms don't just sort content. They teach us, day after day, notification after notification, to see the entire world as a permanent ranking. Most viral. Most seen. Most liked. Most relevant. In their logic, nothing gets to simply be good<\/em>. Everything has to be positioned, quantified, measured against everything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And without noticing, we've started looking at our own lives the same way. We no longer just ask whether a day was good. We ask, almost instinctively, how it measures up against someone else's day, displayed perfectly, a few rows down the feed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Western culture spent centuries cultivating a particular kind of attention: linear, quiet, capable of following the same thread of ideas page after page. From the manuscript, to the printing press, to the essay, to the novel, to the university as an institution built specifically for this exercise \u2014 staying with a thought long enough to take it somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It's no wonder the mind hasn't managed to adapt to what came next. A kind of attention cultivated over centuries can't stay intact once the environment that sustained it changes almost overnight \u2014 and we changed that environment in under twenty years. Not gradually, the way it always happened before. Suddenly, within the span of a single generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this, I think, is where today's real divide shows up. For a long time I thought it had to do with education \u2014 who read more, who knew more things. I think it's shifted. It no longer depends on how much you know, but on how long you can stay with one single thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are still people who can read twenty pages without reaching for their phone, who can hold a long conversation without feeling the urge to cut it short. And there are people who consume hundreds of images and headlines but almost no thread all the way through. It isn't a difference in intelligence. It's a difference in training \u2014 exactly like a muscle, built through use and lost through disuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is also where the real distance shows up between people for whom any new tool feels like an invitation to explore, and people who simply feel they no longer have the energy to even ask where to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We recognize faces, headlines, concepts, names. But the moment we're asked to explain any of it, we stumble almost immediately. Nicholas Carr wrote, back in 2010, that the internet pushes us toward shallow processing \u2014 good at gathering fragments, poor at weaving them into anything coherent. And Maryanne Wolf, who spent decades studying the neural circuitry of reading, says something I find essential: deep reading isn't an innate talent, but a circuit the brain builds through practice <\/strong>\u2014 one it can also lose, if we stop using it. We didn't stop reading because we ran out of time. We slowly stopped having the patience it takes to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe this is where the loss hurts most. Attention isn't just the tool we use to read a book or learn something new. It's also how we tell another person: I'm here, keep going. When we can no longer stay with someone's story to the end, we don't just lose information. We lose a form of closeness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don't think the point of this piece is to demonize a technology. I think the point is simpler, and at the same time harder to sit with: what we've lost without noticing.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe intelligence isn't the first thing we lose. Maybe, before that, we lose the stillness out of which intelligence is able to grow.<\/strong> An idea doesn't appear between two notifications. An idea appears when someone stays long enough in the same place in the mind to let it grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next time someone asks me what AI even is,<\/em>I don't think I'll just hear a question about technology. I'll hear, underneath it, something that concerns all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe it isn't information we're missing.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe we've simply forgotten how to sit with a thought.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe symptom, not the disease<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The mechanism that never stops<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A world understood as a ranking<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What we built over two thousand years \u2014 and changed in twenty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What's happening to us<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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