"Just consider a typical day in the life of a modern human: you glance at your phone while waiting for coffee to brew, skim headlines while half-listening to a podcast, mentally rehearse a client pitch while walking your child to school, reply "noted" on Slack during a meeting while updating a slide deck, check your bank balance while standing in line,"
"That said, generative AI and AI agents add yet another layer of temptation to multitask, and a respectable excuse for doing so. Now we can draft an email while an agent prepares slides, ask a chatbot to summarize a report while we skim LinkedIn, generate code while answering Slack, or prompt three models at once while half-editing a memo. This feels like augmented productivity, but often becomes cognitive diffusion or an increase in work intensity."
Human capacity to juggle several tasks at once supports coordination of competing goals, priorities, and impulses across daily life. Everyday routines like glancing at a phone, skimming headlines, rehearsing a pitch while walking a child, replying on Slack during meetings, and checking finances illustrate habitual multitasking. Generative AI and AI agents introduce an additional layer of temptation and a convenient excuse to multitask by enabling simultaneous drafting, summarizing, coding, and model prompting. Those tools can feel like augmented productivity but often lead to cognitive diffusion and increased work intensity. When machines take over fragments of thinking, humans risk supervising many shallow streams instead of producing coherent arguments, contributing to intellectual sloppiness.
Read at Fast Company
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