Short Takes #16: The Walking Wounded
Robert Anton Wilson | Women and AI | Amazon Go and Fresh | US Labor Rate | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie
Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief.
| Robert Anton Wilson
…
In his final column at the NY Times, David Brooks offered this:
Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.
Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men.
This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries. The pattern holds whether researchers look at business owners in Kenya, software developers in Sweden, or executives in the United States..
Here’s what makes the number strange: the gap persists even when access is equalized. In one experiment, researchers gave 17,000 male and female entrepreneurs in Kenya identical access to ChatGPT, with detailed instructions on how to use it. Women remained 13% less likely to engage with the tool.
“Even when the opportunity to use ChatGPT was equalized, women were less likely to engage with the tool,” notes Harvard’s Rembrand Koning, “which we think is pretty shocking.”
| Abi Awomosu, They Built Stepford AI and Called It “Agentic”
Awomosu argues that women feel that AI is ‘icky’ it’s taking over work — including emotional labor — of the sort women have traditionally performed. An interesting read.
Amazon 86s Go and Fresh
Last week, Amazon announced that it was closing its Amazon Go cashier-less convenience stores and its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. Layoffs from those stores surpassed 7,500 people, according to state filings.
| Karen Weise, Amazon’s $200 Billion Spending Plan Raises Stakes in A.I. Race
But they are doubling down on Whole Foods and Amazon Same Day delivery of grocery items, now including perishables. It’s a cheaper way to avoid cashiers to have people order at amazon.com. And they sold over of groceries $100B — even excluding Whole Foods — in 2025.
US Labor Rate
This is from January 2026 [emphasis mine]:
The American labor market has entered 2026 in respectable shape, continuing to muddle through challenges even as it loses strength.
Employers continued to hire modestly in December and the unemployment rate declined, federal data showed on Friday, but hiring across 2025 was the weakest in five years, driven in part by government staffing cuts and tumultuous public policy.
Employers added 50,000 jobs in the last month of 2025 and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent, the data showed. Average hourly earnings grew at 0.3 percent on a monthly basis in December and 3.8 percent on an annual basis, an acceleration compared with previous months.
I have a Kalshi bet that January’s unemployment rate will be above 4.3%, and it looks like I will win it.
The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie
In our anxious age, increasing attention is being directed to our attention, and to the extraordinary and seemingly inescapable forces trying to exploit it. In one recent survey, 75 percent of respondents said they have some kind of attention problem. The psychologist Gloria Mark has documented a precipitous slide over the past two decades in our ability to stay on task in various screen-based activities, findings that buttress what has become a widespread complaint.
| D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, Peter Schmidt
The information appliances that surround us are warping our minds.
Slow down. Don’t stream videos, TikToks, or Instagram. Free your mind.