Minimizing Distractions

Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman ​made a bold prediction​: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Soon after, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, elaborated on this claim when he stated in an interview that 2025 would be the year “that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing…to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.” He provided examples, such as filling out paperwork and booking hotel rooms. ​An Axios article covering Weil’s remarks​ provided a blunt summary: “2025 is the year of AI agents.” These claims mattered. A chatbot can summarize text or directly a…

In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 inches) that cost only a quarter; a significant discount at a time when a typical hardcover book would ​set you back​ between $2.50 and $3.00. To make the economics of this new model work, Simon & Schuster had to move a huge volume of units. “[They] sold books where they had never been available before–grocery stores, drugstores and airport terminals,” explains Clive Thompson in ​a fascinating 2013 article​ about the Pocket Books phenomenon. “Within two years, [they’d] sold 17 million.” Thompson quotes the hi…

As of last week, children​ under the age of 16 in Australia are now banned ​from using a long list of popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and, perhaps most notably, TikTok The law requires these companies to identify and deactivate accounts of users under 16, and to prevent them from setting up new accounts in the future. Failure to comply can result in fines of up to $33 million. Since it was proposed a year ago, the ban has drawn complaints from tech companies who argued that determining users’ ages is somehow beyond their engineers’ capabilities. There was also scattered pushback from civil liberties groups concerne…

The recent ​announcement​ that Netflix formalized a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s television and film studios, as well as the HBO Max streaming service, got me thinking about an essay that Derek Thompson published on ​his ​Substack titled ​“Everything is Television.​” “A spooky convergence is happening in media,” he begins. “Everything that is not already television is turning into television.” Thompson then gives three examples of what he means: 1. Social Media is moving from offering connection to streaming videos (in ​court documents​ from this summer, Meta admitted that only 7% of activity on their Instagram platform involves users following peo…

Last year, the celebrated New Yorker writer David Grann spoke with Nieman Storyboard about his book, The Wager. The interviewer asked Grann how he manages to keep coming across the kind of stories that most writers would dream of finding, even once in their lives. Here’s how Grann responded: “Coming up with the right idea is the hardest part. First, you try to find a story that grips you and has subjects that are fascinating. Then, you ask: Are there underlying materials to tell that story?… The third level of interrogation is: Does the story have another dimension, richer themes, or trap doors that lead you places?” He later adds: “I spend a preliminary p…

James Somers recently published an interesting essay in The New Yorker titled “The Case That A.I. Is Thinking.” He starts by presenting a specific definition of thinking, attributed in part to Eric B. Baum’s 2003 book What is Thought?, that describes this act as deploying a “compressed model of the world” to make predictions about what you expect to happen. (Jeff Hawkins’s 2004 exercise in amateur neuroscience, On Intelligence, makes a similar case). Somers then talks to experts who study how modern large language models operate, and notes that the mechanics of LLMs’ next-token prediction resemble this existing definition of thinking. Somers is careful to constrain hi…

The address that I use for this newsletter has long since been overrun by nonsense. Seemingly every PR and marketing firm in existence has gleefully added it to the various mailing lists that they use to convince their clients that they offer global reach. I recently received, for example, a message announcing a new uranium mining venture. Yesterday morning, someone helpfully sent me a note to alert me that “CPI Aerostructures Reports Third Quarter and Nine Month 2025 Results.” Here’s the problem: this is also the address where my readers send me interesting notes about my essays, or point me toward articles or books they think I might like. I want to read these messa…

Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife had a conference call, so I decided to wander the nearby university campus to work on a vexing theory problem my collaborators and I had taken to calling “The Beast.” I remember what happened next because ​I wrote an essay​ about the experience. The tale starts slow: “It was early, and the fog was just starting its march down the Berkeley hills. I eventually wandered into an eucalyptus grove. Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought.” I eventually come across an interesting new technique to circumvent a key mathematical obs…

A couple of weeks ago, Ezra Klein ​interviewed​ AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky about his new, cheerfully-titled book, ​If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies​. Yudkowsky is worried about so-called superintelligence, AI systems so much smarter than humans that we cannot hope to contain or control them. As Yudkowsky explained to Klein, once such systems exist, we’re all doomed. Not because the machines will intentionally seek to kill us, but because we’ll be so unimportant and puny to them that they won’t consider us at all. “When we build a skyscraper on top of where there used to be an ant heap, we’re not trying to kill the ants; we’re trying to build a skyscraper,” …

Back in 2008, when I was still early in my writing career, I published an essay on my blog that posed a provocative question: Would Lincoln Have Been President if He Had Email? This was one of my early attempts to grapple with problems like digital distraction and focus that would eventually evolve into my books Deep Work and A World Without Email. And at its core was a troubling notion that occurred to me in response to watching a documentary about our sixteenth president: If the Internet is robbing us of our ability to sit and concentrate, without distraction, in a Lincoln log cabin style of intense focus, we must ask the obvious question: Are we doomed to be a gen…

On ​my podcast this week​, I took a closer look at OpenAI’s new video generation model, ​Sora 2​, which can turn simple text descriptions into impressively realistic videos. If you type in the prompt “a man rides a horse which is on another horse,” for example, you get, well, this: AI video generation is both technically interesting and ethically worrisome in all the ways you might expect. But there’s another element of this story that’s worth highlighting: OpenAI accompanied the release of their new Sora 2 model with a new “social iOS app” called simply Sora. This app, clearly inspired by TikTok, makes it easy for users to quickly generate short videos bas…

This week on my podcast, I delved deep into the neural mechanisms involved in making your phone so irresistible. To summarize, there are bundles of neurons in your brain, associated with your short-term motivation system, that recognize different situations and then effectively vote for corresponding actions. If you’re hungry and see a plate of cookies, there’s a neuron bundle that will fire in response to this pattern, advocating for the action of eating a cookie. The strength of these votes depends on an implicit calculation of expected reward, based on your past experiences. When multiple actions are possible in a given situation, then, in most cases, the action as…

Last week, I published an essay about the so-called Great Lock In of 2025, a TikTok challenge that asks participants to tackle self-improvement goals. I argued that this trend was positive, especially for Gen Z, because the more you take control of your real life, the easier it becomes to take control of your screens. In response, I received an interesting note from a reader. “The biggest challenge with this useful goal Gen Z is pursuing,” he wrote, “is they don’t know what to do.” As he then elaborates: “Most of them are chasing shiny objects that others are showing whether on social media or in real life. And when they (quickly) realize it’s not what they wa…

If there’s one thing that I’m always late to discover, it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I’m only now starting to hear about the so-called “Great Lock In of 2025.” This idea began circulating on TikTok over the summer. Borrowing the term ‘lock in’, which is Gen Z slang for focusing without distraction on an important goal, this challenge asks people to spend the last four months of 2025 working on the types of personal improvement resolutions that they might otherwise defer until the New Year. “It’s just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you’re going to do,” explained one TikTok influencer, ​quoted recently​…

At a time when educators are increasingly concerned about technology’s impact in the classroom, the Washington Post published ​an op-ed​ with a contrarian tone. The piece, written by the journalism professor Stephen Kurczy, focuses on Green Bank, a small town in rural West Virginia, home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. Due to the sensitivity of this device, the entire area is a congressionally designated “radio quiet zone” in which cell service and WiFi are banned. The thought of a disconnected life might sound refreshing, but as this op-ed argues, there’s one group for which this reality might be causing problems: the students in Green Bank’s combin…

Many of you have been asking me about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this week during a campus event at Utah Valley University. At the time of this writing, little is yet known about the shooter’s motives, but there have been enough cases of political violence over the past year that I think I can say what I’m about to with conviction… Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, “Twitter is not real life.” But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter (and Bluesky, and TikTok) do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, t…

Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had taught the topic, so he looked forward to revisiting it. As he explained in ​an essay​ about the experience, he decided to start the lecture by discussing the so-called Flynn Effect—the well-known phenomenon, first observed by James Flynn, whereby measured IQ scores have been steadily increasing since World War II. “It’s always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who have ever lived,” Dehli wrote. But as he gathered data to build an up-to-date chart, he was “very surprised” by what he discovered: “IQ h…

Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title:​ “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”​ He opens with a spicy take: “I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.” As Barr elaborates, when starting his first company, he slept only three and a half hours per night. “The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gaine…

In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the looming impacts of generative AI. This reaction has been fueled, in part, by the confident declarations of tech CEOs, who have veered toward increasingly bombastic rhetoric. “AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. He added that half of entry-level white collar jobs might be “wiped out” in the next one to five years, creating unemployment levels as high as 20%—a peak last seen during the Great Depression. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that …

A reader recently sent me ​a Substack post​ they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of their hands while still letting them chat with friends,” the post’s author, Priscilla Harvey, writes. “But it’s turned into the sweetest, most unexpected surprise: my son’s new daily conversations with his grandmothers.” As Harvey continues, her son has adopted the habit of stretching out on the couch, talking to his grandmother on a retro rotary-style phone, the long cable stretching across the room. “There’s no scrolling, no distractions, no comparisons, no dopamine hits to chase,” she notes. “Instead he is just listening to stories…

In the wake of my recent (and inaugural) visit to Disneyland, I read Richard Snow’s history of the park, Disney’s Land. Early in the book, Snow tells a story that I hadn’t heard before. It fascinated me—not just for its details, but also, as I’ll soon elaborate, for its potential relevance to our current moment. The tale begins in 1948. According to Snow, Disney’s personal nurse and informal confidant, Hazel George, had become worried. “[She] began to sense that her boss was sinking into what seemed to her to be a dangerous depression,” Snow writes. “Perhaps even heading toward what was then called a nervous breakdown.” The sources of this distress were obvious. …

I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions. The first narrative notes that Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally well-suited for coding because source code, at its core, is just very well-structured text, which is exactly what these models excel at generating. Because of this tight match between need and capability, the programming industry is serving as an economic sacrificial lamb, the first major sector to suffer a major AI-driven upheaval. There has been no shortage of evidence to support these claims. Here are s…

In the spring of 2019, while on tour for my book Digital Minimalism, I stopped by the Manhattan production offices of Brian Koppelman to record an episode of his podcast, The Moment. We had a good conversation covering a lot of territory. But there was one point, around the twenty-minute mark, where things got mildly heated. Koppelman took exception to my skepticism surrounding social media, which he found to be reactionary and resisting the inevitable. As he argued: “I was thinking a lot today about the horse and buggy and the cars. Right? Because I could have been a car minimalist. And I could have said, you know, there are all these costs of having a car: y…

Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day workweek. Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials which unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is about 1% of Iceland’s total working population. These subjects were drawn from multiple different types of workplaces, including, notably, offices and social service providers. Not everyone dropped an entire workday, but most participants reduced their schedule from forty hours to at most thirty-six hours a week o…

One of the main topics of this newsletter is the quest to cultivate sustainable and meaningful work in a digital age. Given this objective, it’s hard to avoid confronting the furiously disruptive potentials of AI. I’ve been spending a lot time in recent years, in my roles as a digital theorist and technology journalist, researching and writing about this topic, so it occurred to me that it might be useful to capture in one place all of my current thoughts about the intersection of AI and work. The obvious caveat applies: these predictions will shift — perhaps even substantially — as this inherently unpredictable sector continues to evolve. But here’s my current …