Linda Stone — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Linda Stone — On AI. 14 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
AI and the Perfection of Scanning
Stone's diagnosis of how AI tools transform scanning from a triage function into the dominant mode of attention by perfecting the variable reinforcement schedule that sustains it.
Attention Residue
Sophie Leroy's 2009 finding — central to Perlow's framework — that when a person shifts from Task A to Task B, a portion of Task A remains in working memory, consuming cognitive resources and degrading performance on Task B.
Continuous Partial Attention
Stone's foundational concept for the cognitive state in which the mind scans every channel and settles on none — structurally distinct from multitasking and uniquely intensified by AI.
Cortisol
The primary glucocorticoid hormone of the stress response — the molecule that sharpens attention and mobilizes glucose in acute mobilization, and the molecule that suppresses immunity and erodes the hippocampus when chronically elevated.
Flow State
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's name for the condition of optimal human engagement — and, in Wiener's framework, the subjective signature of a well-regulated negative feedback system.
Full Attention
The cognitive and somatic state of complete presence to a single focus — the foundation on which understanding is built, and the state AI-augmented work systematically displaces.
Presence (Stone)
Stone's distinction between attention (a mechanism that can be directed across multiple objects) and presence (the quality of complete being-there that AI cannot multiply and may, by multiplying attention, eliminate altogether).
Screen Apnea
Stone's name for the involuntary shallowing or holding of the breath that accompanies the scanning of a screen — a physiological signature of attentional vigilance that approximately 80% of users exhibit unaware.
The Always-On Mind
The cognitive state of perpetual vigilance Stone first observed in 1990s Microsoft executives — now democratized by smartphones and intensified by AI into the operating condition of every knowledge worker.
The Productive Addiction as System Phenomenon
The specific behavioral configuration — compulsive AI-augmented engagement experienced as exhilaration from within and pathology from without — produced by a reinforcing loop without a balancing counterpart.
The Workmanship of Certainty
Pye's term for work in which the result is predetermined by the apparatus — the jig, mold, template, die, or trained model — and the worker's moment-to-moment judgment during production matters little or not at all.
The Workmanship of Risk
Pye's term for work in which the outcome is not predetermined — quality depends on the maker's continuous judgment, care, and skill, and every moment of production admits the possibility of failure.
