Sophie Leroy — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Sophie Leroy — On AI. 27 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.
Attention Residue
The cognitive trace of an unfinished task that persists in working memory after switching to a new one — contaminating subsequent performance in ways the person cannot detect.
Cognitive Constellation Assembly
The 20–30 minute process of populating working memory, configuring executive control, and building emotional investment for deep work — destroyed at each interruption.
Context-Switching Cost
The sum of residue generation, constellation disassembly, and reassembly expenses — the total cognitive tax of moving between projects.
Deep Work
Newport's term for professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes cognitive capabilities to their limit — creating new value, improving skill, and resisting easy replication.
Drift (System Behavior)
The gradual divergence between a system's intended behavior and its actual operation — often attributed to complexity but substantially driven by accumulated micro-errors from degraded judgment.
Executive Function Development
The extended construction project — from age six to twenty-five — during which inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility are shaped by the demands the environment places on them.
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.
Interruption Costs
The compound expense of disrupted work — including the 23-minute recovery lag, residue generation, and the destroyed value of interrupted flow.
Judgment Degradation Gradient
The systematic decline in evaluation quality across the workday as residue accumulates — first judgment sharpest, fifteenth judgment measurably worse.
Quality Debt (Organizational)
The accumulated cost of decisions made with adequate but degraded judgment — outputs approved under residue that look right and are subtly wrong.
Recovery Windows (Cognitive)
Periods of genuine disengagement during which working memory clears, executive control relaxes, and emotional regulation replenishes — not optional breaks but structural requirements.
Task Seepage
The Berkeley researchers' term for the colonization of previously protected temporal spaces by AI-accelerated work — the mechanism through which the recovery windows of pre-AI workflows disappear.
Task-Set Reconfiguration
The cognitive cost of switching the executive control system's configuration from one task's demands to another's — measurable even for simple, well-practiced tasks.
Technical Debt
Ward Cunningham's 1992 metaphor for the cost of expedient decisions in software — now reshaped by AI into a new variant: the debt of implicit decisions that were never evaluated against a consistent design.
The Monitoring Tax
The unmeasured cognitive cost of evaluating AI-generated outputs across multiple projects — a tax paid in degraded judgment quality invisible to productivity metrics.
The Orange Pill Moment
The threshold crossing after which the AI-augmented worker cannot return to the previous regime — The Orange Pill's central metaphor for the qualitative, irreversible shift in what a single person can build.
The Productivity Number
Edo Segal's twenty-fold multiplier from Trivandrum — received by the culture with the reverence a quantitative civilization reserves for quantitative claims, and the archetypal thin description of a transformation whose meaning lives elsew…
Twenty-Three Minutes (Recovery Time)
Gloria Mark's finding that returning to a task after interruption requires an average of 23 minutes 15 seconds to regain pre-interruption performance.
Working Memory as Executive Substrate
The first leg of Goldberg's executive tripod — the capacity to hold multiple elements in active consciousness simultaneously, whose four-to-five-item limit constitutes the fundamental bottleneck on creative coordination.
Byung-Chul Han
Korean-German philosopher (b. 1959) whose diagnoses of the smoothness society and the burnout society anticipated the pathologies of AI-augmented work with unsettling precision.
Cal Newport
Computer scientist and productivity theorist whose Deep Work (2016) brought attention residue to wide audiences and prescribed focused depth as the antidote.
Edo Segal
Serial entrepreneur and technologist whose The Orange Pill (2026) provides the phenomenological account — the confession over the Atlantic — that Pang's framework diagnoses and treats.
Gloria Mark
UC Irvine informatics professor whose empirical studies quantified the costs of workplace interruption — including the now-canonical 23-minute recovery time.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Hungarian-American psychologist (1934–2021), father of flow theory, Nakamura's mentor and collaborator across four decades, whose foundational mapping of the peak experience provided the framework Nakamura extended into vital engagement.
Sophie Leroy
French-American organizational psychologist whose 2009 discovery of attention residue identified the hidden cognitive cost of task-switching.