AI makes you faster. It doesn’t make you infinite.

When AI meets productivity, the world feels like your oyster — until you find out it’s your neurons getting fried to a crisp.

AI does a great job of improving our productivity levels and expanding our capabilities and capacity. That’s an overall great thing to have.

The problems occur when organizations start to realize that, pushed to its limits, AI can 10x, 20x, maybe even 100x an employee’s productivity — and starts demanding individuals take on more projects, produce more, and context switch more.

This can all work for a while, and it’s intoxicating. Goodness, do I know it’s intoxicating. You feel unstoppable… until one day your brain stops processing.

There’s only so much context switching the human mind can absorb before it starts to fry. We’re going to see a wave of exhausted, hollowed-out teams in the next few years.

AI will get the blame — but the real culprit will be how it was greedily deployed by organizations that never properly thought through the human cost of AI.

Yes, AI will probably save you money in the long run, but you’re not just paying for it with capital alone. Your employees’ and teams’ cognition is a hidden currency that AI just as happily consumes as it does tokens.

The washing machine analogy

So instead, take a step back and look at the humble washing machine.

The washing machine didn’t teach anyone to scrub better. It made scrubbing disappear and gave people back something more valuable in return — time, energy, attention for things that actually matter.

Some companies looked at the washing machine and said: great, now we can do ten major loads a day — and make our employees scrub clothes manually during downtime.

All they’ve done is disempower their employees and found a faster way to burn them out.

The only question that matters

Before deploying AI, the only question worth asking honestly is:

What happens to the human on the other side of this decision?

Because AI feels very productive right up until there’s nobody left with enough cognitive bandwidth to check whether any of it was actually good.