AI is Making Us Faster, More Productive, and Worse at Thinking
April 11, 2026 – 7:30 am
AI is everywhere, the pressure to adopt it is relentless, and the evidence that it’s making us smarter is becoming increasingly thin. On New Year’s Day 2026, a programmer named Steve Yegge launched an open-source platform called Gas Town. It allows users to orchestrate swarms of AI coding agents simultaneously, assembling software at speeds no single human could match. One user described the experience as follows:
“There’s really too much going on for you to comprehend reasonably,” […]
“I had a palpable sense of stress watching it.”
This sentiment should be pinned to the wall of every executive suite, every venture capital boardroom, and every CES keynote stage where the word “intelligence” is thrown around like confetti. Because something strange is happening in our relationship with technology we call intelligent.
The machines are getting faster. Yet, humans interacting with them are becoming more exhausted, anxious, and, by several measures, less capable of clear thinking—the very thing intelligence was supposed to enhance.
The pressure to adopt AI has grown so pervasive that it has developed its own vocabulary of coercion:
- “You need to have AI.”
- “You need to use AI.”
- “You need to buy AI.”
- “Your competitors are already using it.”
- "Your children will fall behind without it."
This language doesn’t come from engineers quietly solving problems; it stems from earnings calls, product launches, and LinkedIn posts written with the manic energy of those who have confused selling a product with describing reality.
In January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that AI risked losing its "social permission" to consume vast quantities of energy unless it started delivering tangible benefits to people’s lives. He framed the issue not as a question of whether the technology works, but whether the public can be kept on board while the industry figures out if it does. Nadella called AI a “cognitive amplifier,” offering “access to infinite minds.”
A month later, a Circana survey of US consumers found that 35% of them did not want AI on their devices at all. The top reason wasn’t confusion or technophobia; it was simpler: They said they didn’t need it.
The gap between the rhetoric and the evidence has become increasingly hard to ignore. In March 2026, Goldman Sachs analyzed fourth-quarter earnings data and concluded, in the words of senior economist Ronnie Walker, "no meaningful relationship between productivity and AI adoption at the economy-wide level." The bank noted that a record 70% of S&P 500 management teams had discussed AI on their earnings calls. Only 10% had quantified its impact on specific use cases, and just 1% had quantified it.