- It is not Covid-19: Elon Musk revealed what the disease of the 21st century is
- Attention, algorithms and AI: the impact on children and adults
Despite not being a virus recognized by the scientific community, nor appearing in clinical studies with closed diagnoses, more and more people feel the effects of it in daily life, at work and in the way they connect with the world of “disease of the 21st century“, as he warned Elon Musk.
It should be noted that the alarm is not raised from the field of medicine, but from the heart of the technological ecosystem. The warning has been pronounced by someone who is today considered one of the most influential billionaire magnates of all time.
The founder of SpaceX and former right-hand man of Donald Trump, focused on an everyday phenomenon, apparently harmless, but with profound consequences on the human mind, especially in children and adults constantly exposed.
It is not Covid-19: Elon Musk revealed what the disease of the 21st century is
Elon Musk put the excessive consumption of short videos on social networks at the center of the debate by stating that it is deteriorating the attention span of all Internet users. During an interview at The Katie Miller Podcastcompared platforms like TikTok to a “digital fentanyl”, due to its addictive capacity based on brief and constant stimuli.
According to Musk, this dynamic of oversupply intensifies the fragmentation of attention, a phenomenon that already impacts the work and personal lives of everyone who has a smartphone and access to social networks.
In this sense, it highlights that the permanent change of focus between content imposes what is known as a “cognitive penalty”, which makes it difficult to maintain sustained concentration and make complex decisions.
The businessman maintained that it is not just about individual habits. The very design of the platforms, which has been optimized over time to retain users for as long as possible, prioritizes retention metrics over mental well-being.
Attention, algorithms and AI: the impact on children and adults
Musk explained that recommendation algorithms process millions of posts a day to maintain the constant flow of stimuli. This system amplifies both relevant and irrelevant content, which generates information saturation for the user that is difficult to filter.
In this environment, attention becomes a scarce resource. Children and adults are exposed to a logic that rewards the immediate, the extreme and the emotional, displacing reflective or complex content that requires greater cognitive effort or more elaborate critical thinking.
For Musk, the true disease of the 21st century It is not biological, but cognitive, since it is an attention that is increasingly weakened by the design of the technology that dominates our daily lives.