This week I begin a five-part series, Prior Obligations, released as articles in audio format. It starts with a farmer in a harvester cabin and an executive who never learned to type, because the newest anxiety about AI at work — six forms of "psychological debt", per a much-circulated Harvard Business Review piece — describes a transition from doer to decider that is generations old. The question is not whether the feelings are real. It is who owes the debt.

In This Article:

• The shift from doer to decider predates the technology by generations; the farmer and the typing pool made it before anyone prompted a model.
• The felt experience of deskilling and identity threat is real and consequential, whatever becomes of the framework that names it.
• An ordinary restructure inflicts every one of the six so-called debts in a single quarter, and nobody coined a metaphor for that.
• Cognitive offloading is not a condition awaiting a mitigation programme; it is what happens when nobody leads the use of the tool.
• The genuinely new element is fluent output at the frontier of the user's competence — the one place the user cannot check it.

A Thought With Which To Sit: "The average restructure inflicts every form of the newly itemised debt in a single quarter, more deeply than AI has managed in three years, and nobody ever coined a metaphor for it."