I’ve been on a very lovely summer break, thanks to you. Your patience allowed me time with my family camping, roaming New York City in apocalyptic heat, and squiring a kid to a national tournament. I appreciate you sticking with me. Let’s get back to it.
Four years ago (damn it, I think this means I have to write a new book) I finished The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. In it I posed the highly speculative thesis that commercial AI would fundamentally alter our ability to make good decisions, and not in a good way, because our brains are built to offload choices whenever and however we can, and because as my decades of time reporting on the tech industry has taught me, its incentives always drive it to amplifying our worst impulses.
As a commenter on TikTok said to me the other day, “The only thing worse than being wrong is being early.” Amen, sister.
I’ve been on a jag of speaking gigs — perhaps you’d like to book me yourself? — in which the book’s thesis is finding ever-more-receptive audiences, from boardrooms to professional organizations. Everyone seems to be feeling the malaise of using this stuff, and want to sort out the best way to resist it. So here I’ve broken down the basics of what I argued.
Short version: Your brain runs on shortcuts — what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called System 1, the fast-thinking brain that drives your car, picks your lunch, and carries you through the day on autopilot. (System 2, your slow-thinking brain, is for the rare moments of caution, creativity, and mindfulness when you fully engage your decision-making abilities.) That autopilot kept our ancestors alive. It makes moving through our day a light load, cognitively speaking. But it's also at the root of prejudice, bad choices with money, and political and financial manipulation. It's also the exact vulnerability that a system built to make your choices for you is perfectly suited to exploit, because your brain is wired to hand off effort wherever it can.
So I make the case for cognitive friction — for what one federal judge described to me as "weak perfection": the idea that a harder, slower process is what keeps a mind strong. Entering a guilty plea is a pain, yes, but that's a good thing, because that choice is permanent, and will change your life — and a system that makes the decision frictionless takes away your chance to put your best thinking into it. That’s the challenge we face in all walks of our cognitive lives from here on out. Let’s get ready to protect what’s important.
