AI is increasing my cognitive load

If you spend 5 minutes scrolling through LinkedIn¹, you will no doubt be greeted with multiple "think pieces" about how AI is making everything faster, enabling all of the hustle and grind aficionados to hustle and grind extra hard while they maximise shareholder value, or something.

It sounds great — enabling the worlds most entrepreneurial entrepreneurs to entrepreneur at never-before-seen speed, making a thousand decisions before they've finished their first coffee — but I am personally coming to realise that it has a very specific personal downside when it comes to quality, focus, and cognitive load, and it looks like I'm not the only one.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not averse to using AI tools per se. I use ChatGPT a lot. I use GitHub Copilot. In fact, I am currently field testing a suite of agents on a personal project to validate a framework for accelerated, AI-enhanced software development with the kind of strong governance and guardrails that we apply to "traditional" human-centric software development when dealing with established products and systems that need to operate under high load and intense scrutiny rather than vibe coding proofs of concept.

What I am noticing, however, is that using ChatGPT as a routine part of my working day is having a detrimental effect in certain ways.

I'm pretty sure it's not actively making me more stupid (yet), which is good, but it is creating a lot of cognitive load.

That may seem a little counterintuitive given that AI tools are actually very good at synthesising disparate information, rationalising data, and proposing what are often quite cogent options, so it should take away cognitive load rather than cause or exacerbate it.

To understand the issue fully, we need to add some context. (AI tools love context.)

The first pertinent fact here is that my brain is geared for focus, systems thinking, and complex problem solving. I can do multiple concurrent, short-focus, shallow-depth activities, but it's not what I do best and as a consequence it's not where or how I add most value.

In truth, I have some very ADHD-like tendencies². A capacity for deep focus and system thinking should come as no surprise in that context, but nor should executive dysfunction when presented with too many competing things demanding any focus, let alone deep focus.

The ability of AI to enable participation in multiple different subjects, topics, or activities in rapid succession is brilliant in theory but problematic for me in practice, partly because the things I work on do not tend to be of the "fire and forget" or "one and done" category, and context switching is the single biggest productivity killer for people like me.

The second pertinent fact is that many — if not most — of the things that I work on are not about rapid, isolated decision-making - they are inter-connecting and inter-related parts of a complex whole, so instead of reducing cognitive load by offloading tasks to AI I actually end up having to think about (and try to focus on) many more things at once.

AI tools can also be fantastic for the kind of deep dives that traditionally take a significant amount of time — deep research or analysis, unpicking complex code, or building something new in an unfamiliar technology — but the value proposition there is the ability to use the AI assistant as an exploratory tool, and the ultimate value outcome is the resulting human understanding rather than a generated aretfact like a document or functioning code that is not actually understood.

There is also an argument that for those tasks which are actually able to be dealt with quickly and efficiently via AI augmentation what we end up optimising for is simply faster decision-making rather than better decisions.

In some cases merely being faster is enough of a benefit, but I'm not sure that enabling bad decisions to be made more quickly and with less introspection is the best use of this latest technological wonder.

Footnotes

1. LinkedIn is, for some, an essential recrutiment and job hunting resource. For others it's a business and networking platform. And for others still it is a ruthlessly self-aggrandising and repetitious hellhole full of the kind of people that sane people would not want to work for or with. It is all of those things. The irony of me probably cross-posting this to LinkedIn is not lost on me. ↩

2. It may be more "actual ADHD" than "ADHD-like" based on my personal research and introspection (with, ironically, some help from Dr. ChatGPT), but a formalised Adult ADHD diagnosis in the UK can be... well, let's call it "long and involved". 50 years of masking and adaptation has resulted in me being quite good at coping with my brain's pecularities, so I don't necessarily think medication would be a huge benefit for me, and nor would "reasonable adjustments" at work be especially beneficial or practical. Never say never though... ↩