Is AI making us more efficient or just wearing down our brains?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

The promise of artificial intelligence is it'll take on all the boring tasks we don't want to do and free us up to do the fun, high-level thinky work.

But managing the AI tools can be its own kind of work.

A new study from the Boston Consulting Group found that when workers have to closely monitor and manage their AI tools, it can cause cognitive exhaustion.

They dubbed this AI brain fry.

Matt Krop is a managing director and senior partner at BCG.

He's one of the co-authors of this new study.

There's this sense of, I have to always be on, my brain is always on, and then after, you know, a number of hours working this way,

it describes kind of a buzzing feeling and, and this sense of just being overloaded. That doesn't

happen, you know, in normal work. Yeah, you have this really evocative description in the study from

one engineering manager who wrote, instead of moving faster, my brain just started to feel cluttered.

It was like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head all fighting for attention.

I caught myself rereading the same stuff, second guessing, way more than usual,

and getting weirdly impatient.

What do you think was happening to this person?

Yeah.

So, you know, we as humans, we can only focus on one thing at a time.

And in normal work, you know, we're really just interacting with one person or interacting

with one task.

And so what's happening here is I'm now starting to cue up, you know, a whole set of things

that are happening at the same time that I'm

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