How AI Taught Me to Be Human Again
The greatest irony of our age: We invented AI to capture more of our attention, and it might end up being the thing that finally gives it back.
Until last year, most of my mornings looked like this – My phone in hand before my eyes were fully open. Scrolling through LinkedIn while my pour-over coffee brewed. Skimming 47 unread emails while the cup sat cooling on my kitchen table. By 8:00 a.m., I'd consumed maybe a sip of coffee and approximately 1000 words of other people's urgencies.
These days, things are different. I actually taste my coffee in the morning. Read a few pages of a book. Check my phone once—briefly. Something shifted between last year and now. And weirdly, it wasn't willpower or discipline or a digital detox.
It was the opposite: leaning into technology, not away from it. The shift came from AI agents handling my morning triage, filtering out the noise and surfacing only what actually needed me.
The Attention Economy's Perfect Trap
It's not far-fetched to say that Silicon Valley didn't just build tools—they built slot machines. The like button. The infinite scroll. The red notification badge. Each is carefully engineered to keep you hooked.
We spend 7 hours a day staring at screens because billion-dollar companies hired neuroscientists to make sure we couldn't look away. The whole economy reorganized around a simple idea: attention is the new oil, extraction is the game.
Beautiful, addictive interfaces kept us engaged. More time in the app = more ads, more data, more money.
The Irony No One Saw Coming
AI was supposed to be the next level of this. Algorithms to keep you scrolling even longer.
But something strange is happening: AI does not need us to use complex user interfaces most of the time.
When AI reads your email and drafts responses, you don't stare at your inbox for an hour. When it summarizes meetings, you don't sit through them.
The attention economy was built on friction—making you do all the clicking, scrolling, typing. AI removes that friction. And by doing that, it breaks the whole business model.
Intelligence That Needs Way Less of You
I first noticed this pattern while building AI agents at my company Inductiv. Although we are focused on enterprise AI, the dynamic is universal: the better our agents get at handling work autonomously, the less time people spend in interfaces.
The app wants your attention. The AI just wants your intent.
Tech companies spent twenty years optimizing for engagement—more clicks, more time, more eyeballs. AI optimizes for efficiency. And efficiency is the opposite of engagement.
Hard to monetize attention you're not even capturing.
Getting Our Freedom Back
When AI handles busywork, you don't just get time back—you get your attention back. Which sounds similar but isn't.
I stopped opening Instagram to "check something quick" and to snap back to reality 40 minutes later feeling gross. I stopped keeping twelve tabs open "just in case."
The compulsion faded. The phantom vibrations. That reflexive checking. The anxiety about being offline.
This is about getting back the parts of yourself that got colonized by the attention economy. The part that could be bored without reaching for your phone. The part that could finish a thought.
The attention economy trained us to be always-on because that's when we're valuable. AI lets us be strategically off because it can stay on for us.
What I'm Doing With This
When I catch myself scrolling mindlessly now, there's this quiet voice: "Is this what you actually want to be doing? Or just what the algorithm wants?"
More and more, I can just... stop.
I'm reading again. Actual books that need sustained attention. Having conversations that go longer than a dopamine hit. Sitting with ideas without immediately hunting for the next input.
This isn't about productivity. It's about being unproductive in ways that feel like living. It is about the art of doing nothing, and still feeling happy.
Where I'm Landing On This
The platforms won't like this, but the direction is clear: Better AI means less need for interfaces. Fewer interfaces means less power for platforms.
This is partly why we're building Inductiv the way we are. Privacy-first AI for enterprise, paid for value created—not attention extracted. Our agents work in the background. We don't need users glued to dashboards because we're not selling ads.
When your revenue doesn't depend on screen time, you can build technology that respects attention instead of exploiting it.
AI didn't give me superpowers. It gave me something better: a way to opt out of the attention economy without opting out of modern life.
That's not artificial intelligence. That's just... freedom.
