[…] this technology is horrific for attention. It’s a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated “projects” they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.
Worth a read, whatever your opinion on LLMs.
I think one of the fundamental problems is that we treat mental disorders like they’re some sort of specialized set of adjectives. Being unfocused is “ADHD”. Being shy or fixated on a specific topic is “autistic”. Being emotionally charged in a stressful situation is “bipolar”. We do that and it undermines what it’s actually like to have and deal with those conditions every day, and makes people who actually have them seem “crazy” or “creepy” to people who are just ignorant. It really sets the general consensus back hard.
It doesn’t help that it’s not a mental disorder, but a biological one, largely neurological, that we understand a lot about one of the brain-structure causes now.
The problem is that doom scrolling and repeated exposure to bursts of endorphins creates a physiological syndrome that mimics some of the symptoms of ADHD due to slightly similar reasons, but not all of them.