A couple of things have passed through my feed today about how AI is increasing cognitive load.
The first was a video, that I didn’t save and can’t find again, talking about call centres and how automating away all the simple calls, meant that the call centre staff no longer had any real downtime. Instead of getting a mix of easy calls and difficult calls, now they get nothing but difficult calls with no gaps between them and this makes the work significantly harder. They used to get a bit of a mental break when handling the easy calls and now that’s gone.
The second was this article by André Meyer, showing the same idea but expressed in different terms. [This is his diagram, not mine]
Yes, AI is allowing us to move much faster through the easy work but is at the same time taking away those opportunities for our brains to pause for a moment. Now the work is much more demanding, all the time, and if we don’t force ourselves to stop periodically, this will ultimately lead to burnout.