Cognitive decline is the wrong worry. The cost is process boredom: hard work with no whole thought to hold.

Effectance, the drive to see your own effect on the world, requires a closed loop.

The pivot window back into non-AI infused work is still open for a bit—don't wait.

For humanity to succeed with AI, we need to get a handle on its process.

In 1997, Ernest Bates bought into a hillside in Napa. He was one of the first three Black board-certified neurosurgeons in the United States, the first Black student to graduate from Johns Hopkins’s undergraduate college, and the founder of a publicly traded medical-equipment company. By 2000, he had stopped practicing and was making cabernet. Friends thought it was a hobby. They were wrong about the category. It was a pivot.

The Current Narrative: Chatbots Are Making Us Stupider

The dominant story about AI and human cognition right now is that chatbots are making us stupider. A recent BBC Future piece marshals MIT researchers Pattie Maes and Nataliya Kosmyna on “cognitive offloading” — the worry that frictionless AI is producing a “stupidogenic” society the way cheap processed food produced an obesogenic one. The evidence is real. The diagnosis is not, I think, the right one. I’ll leave that for another day, but suffice to say that working with AI won’t be easy.

The sharper problem is not that humans are getting cognitively weaker. It is that when machines reason and draft faster and better than the human in front of them, the residual role left for the human collapses to prompting, approving, and pasting. We are retained as quality judges and safety handlers. The thinking is no longer ours to do. It is structurally boring—call it process boredom. The work can stay demanding and still be unfulfilling; difficulty was never where the satisfaction came from. In May, I wrote that boredom was not quite the right word. Process boredom is what was missing.

The mechanism here is old. In 1959, the psychologist Robert White........

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