Technology · News
Rock's UN News interview says people hand over thinking
In the UN News interview of 29 October 2026, Rock estimates that perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the workers he sees offload routine tasks and keep harder thinking for themselves.
In this story
- David Rock tells UN News that people hand over thinking when a tool will do it for them.
- "The brain loves conserving energy," he said, and it is tempting to let the tool do the thinking.
- People cannot, and he says many workplaces still plan as if attention had no limit.
- "Change has never been this fast," he said, "but it will never be this slow again."
David Rock tells UN News that people hand over thinking when a tool will do it for them.
On 29 October 2026, UN News published the interview, written by Sachin Gaur. Rock is a neuroscientist, co-founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, and a speaker at UN Skills Fest 2026, whose theme the UN names People at the Centre. He told Gaur, "In some ways, technology isn't changing us at all," because human brains still decide and solve problems much as they long have. The shift he describes is where the effort sits.
He calls the moment a turn from "AI FOMO" to an "AI hangover." Organizations took up generative tools quickly, he said, before the longer effects were clear. "The brain loves conserving energy," he said, and it is tempting to let the tool do the thinking. When people also hand over analysis, evaluation, and the choice of what to trust, he warns that they can lose practice at telling a good idea from a bad one. He separates speed from wisdom and tells workers to keep the brain in the game, because unused skills fade.
Rock says the hard part for workers is too much information, and he compares that pressure with the arrival of email, now larger because messages, notifications, and machine summaries arrive together. Computers, he said, can handle thousands of decisions in a moment. People cannot, and he says many workplaces still plan as if attention had no limit.
He uses a sharper phrase for companionship. The tool, he said, "hacks attachment." Television, books, and phones competed for attention. Chatbots, in his account, compete for conversation and advice. He pointed to research suggesting that long use of an AI companion can leave a person lonelier, and to other work that links heavy chatbot use with less offline contact. The UN News story does not name those studies.
His answer is metacognition, which he explains as thinking about one's own thinking, under a rule he calls "human in the lead." The system can test an assumption or bring up a view the person would have missed. The judgment stays with the person. He said, "The human experience is going to be that much more high value." He expects the pace to stay high. "Change has never been this fast," he said, "but it will never be this slow again."