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It's Not Just You. Reading Is Harder.
AI news, leaders, business insights and more
Dr. Ayesha Khanna
April 02, 2026 • Reading Time: 6 minutes
Hi! Here are today’s top AI stories:
It's Not Just You. Reading Is Harder.
A Robot Cleaner for $10?
AI Around the World
NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS
It's Not Just You. Reading Is Harder.
Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor writes in The New York Times that our digital habits are triggering a cognitive crisis as serious as the mid-20th century heart disease epidemic.
The data is stark. Attention spans have collapsed to one-third of their 2004 levels. Basic reading and math struggles are rising.
Just as our bodies atrophied when modern life removed the need for physical labor, our minds are atrophying now that technology removes the need for hard thinking.
He draws the following parallels:
Junk food = TikTok and Instagram. Algorithmically designed to be irresistible, nutritionally empty, and habit-forming. Stop them. Fully.
Sedentary lifestyle = constant phone access. Just as desk jobs quietly destroyed physical fitness, having your phone always within reach quietly destroys your capacity for sustained focus. Keep the phone away.
Cardio = deep reading. It literally rewires neural pathways, building what neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls "deep reading processes" that increase the complexity of what your brain can handle.
The gym = deliberate contemplation. Sitting with a hard problem, writing your own memo, thinking something through without reaching for a shortcut.
The uncomfortable implication is that using AI to avoid a blank page isn't a productivity hack — it's skipping leg day, every day. The discomfort of hard thinking isn't a bug to be eliminated. It's the whole point.
A Robot Cleaner for $10?
Image: X Square.
A cleaning service in Shenzhen, China, just showed up at someone's front door - and half the team was a robot.
The robot tidied shoes, cleared tables, picked up toys, folded duvets, cleaned a litter box, and even took out the trash on its way out. A human colleague handled the trickier stuff - disinfection, communication, anything requiring a little more than a mop and some manners.
The three-hour session cost $10.70. That's about half what a human cleaner charges. Slots for the entire month of March sold out almost immediately.
Would you book a robot to clean your home? |
AI Around the World
🇧🇷 Brazil's Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents came into force this week, requiring minors under 16 to link social media accounts to a legal guardian - and banning platforms from using addictive features like infinite scroll and autoplay. Companies that ignore the law face fines of up to $9.5M.
🇺🇸 Palantir CEO Alex Karp claims only two types of workers will survive an AI job market - those with vocational/trade skills like plumbing and neurodivergent thinkers. The words sparked backlash online. A 2025 report by Senate Democrats estimated AI could remove nearly 100M US jobs within a decade.
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Until next time!
Amplify Team ❤️
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