How to Help People Thrive with AI

David Brooks’ recent Atlantic essay, “The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age,” argues that the key differentiator in the AI era won’t be intelligence but a person’s relationship to mental effort. The piece is built around the concept of “need for cognition”—a psychological trait that determines whether people enjoy hard thinking or avoid it. But the host of this episode pushes back on Brooks’s implicit determinism, arguing that context, institutional design, and hands-on support can reshape people’s relationship with effort far more than Brooks allows. The episode ends with a concrete case study from Uber that suggests a path forward.

The Cognitive Miser Problem

Brooks draws on research showing that when people adopt AI, their work life becomes more intense, not less. One study found that early adopters’ time on email and chat apps more than doubled, and their use of business software rose by 94%. Another study from UC Berkeley found that workers started taking on tasks they had previously outsourced, squeezing in work bursts in the evening and on weekends. The result: uninterrupted focus time fell by 9%, a state some have dubbed “AI brain fry.”