We Don't Need to Fear AI Taking Our Jobs. We Need to Fear It Taking Our Attention.

Everyone is afraid AI will take our jobs. The greater threat is what it’s already doing to our attention.Time to fight back 👊 I wrote about it for Fortune.

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The Real Threat

Social media hooked us. AI is perfecting the addiction.

Think about what's coming:

• Infinitely personalized content. AI that knows exactly what you want to see before you know it yourself. Feeds that feel like they're reading your mind — because they almost are.
• Generated content at scale. An endless stream of videos, images, and text created specifically to capture your attention. No human bottleneck. Just infinite production.
• Adaptive manipulation. Systems that learn in real-time what makes you click, what makes you stay, what makes you come back. Getting better at hijacking your attention with every interaction.

The algorithms that currently keep you scrolling are about to get dramatically more effective. And they were already winning.

The Attention Economy, Supercharged

Here's the thing about AI: it doesn't have opinions about whether what it's doing is good for you.

It optimizes for whatever metric it's given. And right now, the metric is engagement. Time on platform. Clicks. Shares. Views.

Not your wellbeing. Not your productivity. Not your relationships. Not your mental health.

Just engagement.

Now give that optimization engine exponentially more power, and you get... what we're building right now.

The average American already spends 5 hours and 30 minutes a day on their phone. That's one-third of waking life. What happens when AI makes that experience 10x more compelling?

We're running an experiment on humanity, and nobody consented to participate.

Why This Matters More Than Job Loss

Jobs are important. I'm not dismissing that concern.

But when AI takes a job, you know it happened. There's a before and after. You can respond — retrain, pivot, adapt.

When AI takes your attention, you don't even notice. That's the whole point. The best attention capture is invisible. You just look up and wonder where the last three hours went.

Job loss is obvious. Attention loss is insidious.

And attention is upstream of everything else. Your creativity. Your relationships. Your ability to do deep work. Your presence with the people you love.

Lose your attention, and everything else starts to degrade.

The Movement to Reclaim Focus

Here's the good news: people are waking up.

Over 100 million people downloaded focus apps last year. Reducing screen time is now the #1 New Year's resolution. Schools are banning phones. States are requiring warning labels on social media.

A movement to reclaim our focus is gaining ground.

But we need to move faster. Because AI isn't waiting.

What You Can Do

Recognize the asymmetry. You're not in a fair fight. Thousands of engineers, powered by AI, are working to capture your attention. You need tools and strategies to compete.

Use friction intentionally. Make it harder to access the apps that hijack you. Use blockers. Set time limits. Remove social media from your home screen. Every small barrier helps.

Protect your environment. Your willpower is finite. Your environment is permanent. Design spaces — physical and digital — that make focus the default.

Support systemic change. Individual action matters, but it's not enough. We need policies that hold platforms accountable and business models that align with human wellbeing.

The Stakes Are Clear

Technology alignment with human well-being isn't optional anymore. It's becoming core infrastructure.

We didn't evolve to handle infinite, AI-optimized content competing for every second of our waking lives. No amount of willpower fixes that mismatch.

We need to build systems that protect human attention by design. We need to treat focus as a right, not a luxury.

The question isn't whether AI will transform how we live. It's whether that transformation serves humanity — or just engagement metrics.

I know which side I'm building for.

Your attention is under siege. Fight back. Download Opal and take control of your focus before AI makes it even harder.