is AI Frying Your Brain?
The Harvard Business Review is an ever-reliable source of blog post material. It’s the thinking person’s BrainyQuote.com. So forgive the cliché, but this post is largely based on the recent HBR story on the phenomenon of “AI Brain Fry“.
The TLDR version is this: AI can alleviate workload and burnout by automating repetitive tasks. But it can also contribute to mental fatigue because overseeing the incredibly rapid productivity of AI tools can be quite stressful. Read the full article here.
Experience + data
I read this article a week ago but only decided to post now because I found myself experiencing something like this. Not that I found the oversight of an AI tool particularly stressful*. But rather I found that working with an AI tool - in this case Claude Code - has opened up a new mode of working. One that has in some ways replaced what might otherwise have been downtime.
My work is predominantly creative. I do a lot of reading and research, and a lot of communicating, on stage or on air. But outside of that, I am writing, building slide decks, or making things.
Most of the time I find that I cannot focus on these creative tasks for long spells. Sometimes I will drift into what you might call a ‘flow state’ for an hour or two and be super productive. But the rest of the time I am productive in 20-30 minute bursts. In between these bursts I might read, do some admin, or honestly, doom scroll social media.
I’ve come to accept these periods of downtime as necessary. As long as they’re controlled and don’t dominate my day, the frustration I start to feel at my time-wasting after a little while is usually a sufficient motivator to return to the task at hand and crack on.
A new mode of work
With AI things are different. The oversight-type work of collaborating with a tool like Claude Code is a sufficiently different mode of work that it has come to fill the gaps.
I’ve always found that when I can’t write, I can be productive in a more visual field of design, working in CAD for example to design something 3D printable. When I can’t do that, I can work with my hands. And when I can’t focus on anything, it’s time to switch off for a bit: play a game, watch some YouTube, read a magazine (yes, I still do that).
AI oversight is a different mode again. Something that you can switch back and forth from while doing other things - either passive or active. Something that consumes a limited amount of mental capacity so it’s not too distracting from your core focus, and nor does it require a level of capacity you don’t have when your focus is gone.
But it still requires something from you. And while it is definitely making me more productive, part of me mourns that pure downtime that I find I’m now taking less and less of.
Too many modes
This, I think, contributes massively to the potential of “AI brain fry“. Not just the taxing nature of oversight (which apparently gets more taxing when you’re co-ordinating multiple AI agents at a level that I’m not yet). But the fact that it’s a new mode of work that fills in the gaps between all the other things we used to do.
Regular readers and people who have seen me speak recently will know that I have a fairly deep-seated belief - based, I believe, on good evidence - that the more our lives are digitised, the more we will crave the analogue, the human, the natural. I think this phenomenon of AI-powered hyper-productivity can only contribute to that. We will start to value the slow. Value the breaks and the gaps. Value activities that are necessarily single-focus.
These might also be something of an antidote. Feeling like your brain is fried by AI? It might be time to slow down.
*I’m currently building a tool to help Pomona Partners with its quarterly analysis of the sex split in keynote speakers at conferences. Short version: men continue to dominate stages.