People are experiencing AI 'brain fry' at work

Research suggests using AI for schoolwork may harm critical thinking skills

An MIT study finds lower brain engagement in students who used ChatGPT, resulting in consistent underperformance in neural, linguistic and behavioral levels. AI users struggled to recall their own essays, while the brain-only group showed the highest neural connectivity and satisfaction.

How artificial intelligence, which detects patterns, can identify burnout

Researchers are training AI to detect stress-related symptoms, helping physicians and other medical workers recognize and reduce stress from overwork and potentially avoid burnout.

AI is transforming the marketing and advertising industries

Many marketers argue that AI is useful in an ad agency setting. Others attribute the significant layoffs the industry has faced in recent years, at least in part, to AI. Agency leaders and big tech firms alike have supported experimenting with artificial intelligence’s capacity to create content once reserved for agency creatives.

Will AI kill us all? A debate

As AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, what does that mean for the future of humanity? The podcast Entanglements hosts a pessimistic former OpenAI employee and an optimistic Princeton professor to discuss whether AI brings dystopia or a brighter future.

How to financially prepare if you think AI is coming for your job

One expert suggests contributing more money to an emergency savings fund and putting that fund in a high-yield savings account, maxing out employee benefits while still employed, and more.

Artificial intelligence might make companies too efficient—which could trigger deflation

AI innovation will likely decrease costs for companies and lead to a large increase in supply. That dramatic increase could conceivably bring prices down but keep supply high. However, AI's real impact will likely be complicated by its impact on human labor and the cost of new technology.

The Anthropic Economic Index shows AI adoption is highest in computer science roles

The analysis of millions of anonymized conversations on Claude aims to reveal how AI is being integrated into real-world tasks across the labor market. As of November 2025, 52% of conversations were classified as involving enhancing existing work products, while 45% involved using Claude for automation.

'Context rot' explains why AI conversations degrade the longer they run

Research shows that as a large language model's context window fills up, performance declines, and models begin over-indexing on content at the start and end of a conversation while losing track of what's in the middle. The practical fix is simpler than you'd think: start a fresh chat more often.

'Slow productivity' as a humane approach to work

Work is increasingly encroaching on every part of our lives, while digital technologies enable supervisors to micromanage every part of an employee’s day. “Slow productivity” is a movement to alter the pace and quality of one’s work to avoid burnout and provide a more humane approach to work.

AI's growing energy demands are driving tech companies to consider nuclear power

Big Tech has rebranded nuclear power as a green solution to address the strain on the grid from millions of people using power-hungry AI tools. As of mid-2025, generating one image uses as much electricity as charging the average smartphone, or leaving a household light bulb on for 87 consecutive days.

AI tools are trained on human-created data containing implicit and explicit biases

Because AI tools reflect patterns in their training data, their outputs may reinforce existing societal biases—especially racial ones—rather than offering neutral or fair ones. Adequate training is necessary to undermine these biases whenever new data is incorporated.

AI hallucinations are inaccuracies or falsehoods in generated content

AI hallucinations are a by-product of the sequential creation of content based on patterns in text, which may not reflect the context or meaning behind a prompt. Back-end issues like biased datasets and overfitting of model data contribute to hallucinations.

Readers discovered AI prompts in several romantasy books

In 2025, readers discovered AI prompts in three writers' texts, with one even instructing the AI bot to make a passage sound more like another romance writer. This Futurism piece digs into the scandals and how it's contributed to readers' skepticism about the genre's more prolific writers.

An essay exploring how living day-to-day with a brain implant helps restore a sense of identity

Companies like Neuralink are experimenting with volunteers who have lost control over their bodies. Many of the program's participants claim the most significant benefit from the tool is the ability to perform simple, mundane tasks, such as playing video games or shaking hands, rather than more obvious milestones like walking or eating. This essay explores what it's like, day to day, to use a brain implant.

How burnout creep has spread across various areas of life

Burnout primarily refers to the feeling of being overwhelmed at work and is officially considered an occupational hazard, but colloquially people have started referring to other areas of burnout, including workouts or television shows.

Prompt viruses can exploit and take advantage of integrated AI systems

AI agents—software that can complete requested tasks without ongoing human direction—are expected to increasingly communicate with one another as users and businesses incorporate AI. Providing malicious, self-replicating instructions through prompt injection attacks can cause damaging commands to cascade across systems and services (e.g., banking), without requiring human intervention.

Many dating app users are beginning to suffer from 'dating app burnout'

For younger generations, dating apps have become a primary avenue for creating romantic connections—leaving some users fatigued and contributing to increased feelings of loneliness.

The myth of multitasking's prestige

In this article, renowned neurologist Richard Cytowic seeks to expose multitasking as a fool’s errand. Cytowic explains how the brain, like a computer, switches between tasks rather than handling multiple tasks at once. He shares that attempting to focus on multiple activities at the same time consequentially decreases the brain's ability to ignore distractions, maintain focus, and organize information. Instead, he suggests, try to focus on completing one thing at a time.

How we frame stress—as good or bad—seems to alter how it affects us

This podcast discusses research that indicates stress perception may drastically affect how we respond to it. In research exploring if our stress is presented as diminishing our health versus if we're told it enhances our performance, it will lead to differences in how successful participants are at performing tasks—with the enhancers doing better.

Fintech companies made it easier for merchants to request tips, leading to fatigue

In recent years, companies such as Square and Toast have created touch screen technologies prompting customers at coffee shops and casual restaurants to tip upwards of 25%. Despite the interesting psychological conundrum this presents to consumers, one tech columnist argues that shoppers don’t need to succumb to the pressure.

How art helps us process our feelings

The internet is chock full of hacks and apps that supposedly help you optimize yourself into a more productive person. But Aparna Chivukula argues that spending so much mental energy on "wellness" misses a larger philosophical issue, one that can only be explored through art.

What does it mean for AI to "understand" something?

This Quanta article discusses how programmers are working to create a reliable test for the depth and extent of the knowledge of machines. What does AI know and how does it know it, if it knows anything at all? There's been progress, but it hasn't been easy. Even humans can still be fooled some of the time.

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

The average American likely doesn’t notice how many ads they’re targets of per day

The average American is targeted with roughly 5,000 ads each day—but the conscious mind likely isn’t capable of recalling the majority of those. Even still, many consumers have reported ad fatigue due to the near-constant onslaught of ads.

Limited battery life and increasing discomfort prevent extensive use of mixed reality headsets

Spending 24 hours wearing Apple's Vision Pro highlights some of the challenges facing MR technology, which are compounded by an increasing number of bugs when software is run in nonideal conditions. However, practical and entertainment benefits include placing multiple midair timers when cooking and experiencing immersive multimedia, such as astronomical flythroughs.

A podcast on America’s coming demographic crisis

This podcast explores how America’s coming demographic crisis is bad for employers. According to Bloomberg, businesses still need humans to make the economy work. However, too few workers in the US are actually working, and too few people are...

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

Recent research found that the brain doesn't seem to massively rewire following amputation—upending earlier beliefs about the cause of phantom limb pain.

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Use this calculator to find the dollar value of your mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care for your children.

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Radioactive elements can introduce software errors because the ionizing radiation they produce can detach electrons from atoms, and computer code relies on the distribution of electrons.

Studies suggest when you sleep is as important as how much you get, and syncing with your circadian rhythms may lead to less fatigue and improved long-term health outcomes

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

How fusion—which releases energy when two lighter atoms combine to form a heavier atom—differs from fission

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

11 people died from firework injuries in the US in 2024.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.