#human factor

Automation will be responsible for some of the greatest changes in our way of life. However, I feel that some consequences need to be discussed.

First there is the most obvious one: loss of jobs. Automation will impact minimum wage workers more than anything else. In an ideal society, or at least one without capitalism, this would be a good thing. Less jobs to be done would mean more time for people to explore sports, the arts, and whatever else they enjoy. Instead, many people will end up on the streets because they have no money, and there are no more jobs that don't require higher education (which they can't afford to get, because they've lost their job).

A less discussed consequence has to do with the loss of the Human Factor. When you're ten cents short of being able to pay for your groceries, many cashiers will tell you that's fine, don't worry about it. When my meds come out to more money than usual, a pharmacy assistant will look at my payment history, and change the price to match it. These are things that machines don't do, but many humans will. This is why we need the human factor.

The promise of artificial intelligence was simple: let the machines do the heavy lifting so humans could focus on bigger things. But a growing number of workers — especially heavy AI adopters — are discovering a troubling paradox. Researchers at Boston Consulting Group surveyed nearly 1,500 full-time U.S. employees and found that about one in seven reported symptoms of what they've dubbed "AI brain fry" — a state of acute mental fatigue triggered when AI use exceeds a person's cognitive capacity. The culprits include managing too many AI tools at once, writing complex prompts, and endlessly supervising AI agents — a burden that produced 12% greater mental fatigue and 19% greater information overload among those most affected.

Rather than eliminating cognitive strain, AI appears to be expanding the workload and sphere of accountability for many workers, particularly in marketing, HR, operations, and software development. The irony runs deep: the more AI can do, the more humans feel compelled to oversee, verify, and course-correct — leaving them more mentally drained, not less. Decision fatigue scores ran 33% higher among affected workers, and major error rates climbed 39%, raising serious concerns about long-term performance and well-being.

Why it matters for communicators: As the tools we use to produce faster, smarter content multiply, so does the cognitive tax of managing them — and a burned-out communicator is rarely a sharp one. Understanding this dynamic is essential to building sustainable workflows before "always-on AI" becomes a silent threat to creativity and judgment.