Choices Make the Load

For a long time the music in my car came from my phone. It could play anything, and it kept asking me for things: pick a song, wait for the ad, tap "Skip," pick again. None of it was hard. It was extra work on a drive where I wanted none. Finally I quit it altogether and went back to CDs: classic Chinese pop songs, on collections that give each star one song. I put the disc in and it plays. My driving is more peaceful now.

Key Takeaways

• A tool's load includes every choice it asks you to make while you use it, not only what it gives you to absorb.
• Min Wu's ATPM framework names the match "cognitive load fit": an AI tool should help without overwhelming, and small requests add up.
• A CD fits a drive because it does one job, ends, and cannot interrupt. The limits help, not the disc itself.

What the Phone Was Asking

By features, the phone is the better music player. It has more songs than I could hear in a lifetime. But a drive has little attention to spare, because the road takes most of it. The phone kept drawing on what was left. Each request was tiny, and I never noticed any single one. I noticed the total.

The CD asks almost nothing. I make one decision before the car moves: which disc. After that even the choosing is done for me, because someone long ago gave each star one song. I am left with the road and the music.

The Other Half of Cognitive Load Fit

In Pace Makes Fit I described one way an AI tool can overwhelm a person: it answers faster than the person can absorb. My repair was an hourly timer. That essay was about what a tool gives me.

The car showed me the other direction. A tool also asks. Every option on a screen is a small decision passed to me. Every ad and pop-up is a request for my attention at a moment I did not choose.

The AI Thinking Partnership Model in my textbook, Artificial Intelligence in Public Health, has a dimension called cognitive load fit: is this AI helpful without overwhelming me? I had read that as a question about output. It is just as much a question about demands. A tool's load has two parts: what it gives me to absorb, and what it asks me to decide. In my car the music was easy to absorb. The whole cost was in the asking.

Three Things a CD Cannot Do

The CD in my car has three limits.

It does one job. It plays music. There is no second thing it could be doing, so there is nothing to choose between.

It ends. A disc has a last track. Then there is silence, and whether to play something else is one decision, made at a natural stopping point. A feed has no last track.

It cannot interrupt. It has no way to reach me: no ad, no notification, no suggestion of what to play next.

Each limit removes a whole kind of decision. The peace was what remained when the tool stopped asking.

AI tools sit at the opposite end on all three. They do nearly everything, they never run out, and they are always available. That is what they are for, and it is why I use them. It means the ending has to come from me. The tool will not supply it.

What This Doesn't Prove

This is one driver, one car, and a feeling. I measured nothing.

The disc is not the cause. The CD helps because I cannot scroll it. A phone set to play one album, with notifications off, should deliver most of the same benefit.

Nostalgia is not clarity either. The songs are old and I like them, so some of the peace may come from the songs and not from the simplicity.

And simple is not better everywhere. The phone is the right tool when choosing is the task. The CD is the right tool when driving is the task.

From the Car to the Hospital Corridor

Hospitals have their own version of my CD: the whiteboard in the corridor of an inpatient unit. At the end of a shift, a nurse writes what the next shift must not miss about a patient, such as a medication that changed or something that was removed, and marks it with a highlight color. The choosing is done by the person who knows the patient, so the reader has almost nothing left to decide. To my eye it is still one of the most effective communication tools in the building.

I made the same choice in my own design work. In a paper on heatwave response (doi:10.2139/ssrn.7551199), a colleague and I gave an AI agent the simplest body we could: a passive RFID wristband, an old technology also used for hospital ID bands, read at a doorway. The older adult it serves has nothing to open, pick, or dismiss. She wears the band, and the agent sends one short message with a pickup time and a choice to confirm or reschedule. It is a design on paper, not a deployed system.

That is the standard I would hold an AI tool to in health care. An AI assistant can be accurate and still ask too much of a patient or a nurse: options to pick, prompts to answer, alerts to dismiss. Before adopting a tool, I can count the decisions it will hand to the person using it, at the moment that person will be using it. If the count is higher than the moment can spare, a better answer will not fix it.

Choices make the load.

Observer's Insight

We usually count a tool's value by its options: more songs, more features, more answers. An option is not free to the person who has to choose it. In the AI era the supply of answers has no practical end, so the scarce thing is the attention left for choosing.

In "Pace Makes Fit" I needed a timer to give my work an ending. A CD comes with one.

Reader question: Which tool in your day asks more of you than the task deserves?

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