I, Human

Chapter 2

Weapons of Mass Distraction

How the AI age turned life into a big interruption

Where your attention goes, your time goes.

—Idowu Koyenikan

5:03 p.m., October 7, 2020

I am sitting in my Brooklyn home office in front of three screens, each of which has at least seven apps open. My desire to avoid human, or shall we say analogue, distractions in the house (i.e., lockdown kids) is why I’m wearing noise-canceling headphones, which are playing my Spotify songs and enabling me to ignore any background noises. The people on my Zoom call, however, aren’t so lucky. Because of my high-fidelity microphone, which is extremely sensitive to sound, they are acoustically closer to my children and my domestic mayhem than I am.

As I write, I add different ...