AI as a weapon of mass cognitive destruction

I use AI every day; it’s unavoidable. But something has been grating on me for months, and it isn’t about development: non-technical people are using it to generate far too much slop. Not code slop, but business slop. Five paragraph meeting agendas. Four-page responses to a planning inquiry, because that way I get “all the facts”. A one-line question turns up dressed as a formal memo with a summary, three bullets of tangentially related sub-questions and a partridge in a pear tree. Documents that used to run a page now run six, padded out with restated context that nobody wrote by hand and nobody reads. Words are now effortless, so people produce more of them–whether or not they still mean anything. The illusion of saved timeThe immediacy is a bigger dopamine hit than you’d expect. Type a prompt, get six paragraphs and two tables in seconds, and it feels efficient. The sender reckons they’ve saved twenty minutes, and from where they sit, they have: what took twenty minutes now takes…