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Chapter 1: Is AI making us more efficient or just wearing down our brains?
Is AI making us more efficient or just wearing down our brains? For American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. The promise of artificial intelligence is it'll take on all the boring tasks we don't want to do and free us up to do the fun, high-level thinky work. But managing the AI tools can be its own kind of work.
A new study from the Boston Consulting Group found that when workers have to closely monitor and manage their AI tools, it can cause cognitive exhaustion. They dubbed this AI brain fry. Matt Kropp is a managing director and senior partner at BCG. He's one of the co-authors of this new study.
There's this sense of, I have to always be on, my brain is always on. And then after a number of hours working this way, it describes sort of a buzzing feeling and this sense of just being overloaded that doesn't happen in normal work.
Yeah, you have this really evocative description in the study from one engineering manager who wrote, instead of moving faster, my brain just started to feel cluttered. It was like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention. I caught myself rereading the same stuff, second guessing way more than usual and getting weirdly impatient.
What do you think was happening to this person?
Yeah. So, you know, we as humans, we can only focus on one thing at a time. And in normal work, you know, we're really just interacting with one person or interacting with one task. And so what's happening here is I'm now starting to cue up, you know, a whole set of things that are happening at the same time that I'm having to pay attention to.
And we're just not equipped as a carbon-based species, I guess, to be able to manage that kind of multitasking.
Yeah, I was thinking about this. Managing humans is also challenging. What's different about managing AI agents?
Really, the speed is what's different. If you think about software development, where this is really happening the most right now, Doing a task that a human might take hours or days to do, these agents are doing in a matter of 10, 20 minutes. And so just that compression of a huge amount of work into a much smaller period of time is what really makes this challenging. What is the cost of this?
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Chapter 2: What is 'AI brain fry' and how does it affect workers?
It actually increases the propensity for people to feel like they may quit. If you really have people working in this mode, it's going to affect retention. It's going to affect morale. And so we want to be very careful about how we put people into into these kinds of ways of working so that we're not burning them out.
We'll be right back.
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You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. We're back with Matt Kropp, Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group. Isn't this the opposite of the promise of AI? Like, how do we get to the future where the AI does all the boring stuff for us and not the one where our brains are exhausted?
That's a great framing. And in fact, that's one of the things that we found was this brain fry phenomenon happens when we're sort of excessively working on these high cognitive tasks. But we also found that people, when they use AI to take care of sort of the mundane, repetitive tasks, that actually improved morale, that made them feel better.
And so I do think the promise of AI, as you said, is let's use it to do the things that don't bring us joy. We should focus on applying AI to the toil in our work. And then actually we recommend making sure that we keep the joy in our work for the humans to do.
Are there recommendations you have for employers to help their employees get rid of the toil, up the joy?
We do a lot of work with companies that are bringing AI into their workflows, into their business. And the first thing that we want them to do is really look at the work. How do you redesign the work end-to-end? Not just how do I give you a tool, but how do I think about everything that you're doing? And then if we can go in and...
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Chapter 3: How does multitasking with AI tools lead to cognitive overload?
We get a much better job. We still get the productivity that businesses want. But at the end of the day, the employee is left with a job that they enjoy doing.
Have you ever felt it yourself, Matt?
Oh, yes. I'm doing this myself. So I, in fact, was working on a project where I had multiple agents running at the same time. And I have to say, I was totally wiped by the end of the day.
Is there anything you do to take yourself out of the fry?
So I think this, like any kind of really intense work, I think it's very important to take breaks. We need to be able to have that sort of mental reset. And in fact, some of the participants in the study talked about the need to sort of walk away from their computer, walk outside, go out in nature, be able to disconnect for a bit in order to recharge and reset.
That's Matt Kropp at BCG. Daniel Shin produced this episode. I'm Stephanie Hughes, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.
I'm Rima Grace, and this week on my podcast, This is Uncomfortable, we're looking at the rise of prediction markets, where you can bet on everything from sports and pop culture to political headlines, a multi-billion dollar industry that's growing at a time when more Americans are questioning the traditional paths to wealth.
I feel like the kind of quote unquote American dream is sort of breaking down. Like, how could I possibly, you know, buy a home, be able to afford having a family? And then they're also going online and seeing people that are claiming to make all this money doing these alternative paths to wealth.
Be sure to listen to this week's episode of This is Uncomfortable on your favorite podcast app.
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