Bring a Folding Chair

Women use ChatGPT about 20% less than men in identical roles. Not because they're scared of it. Because nobody's inviting them in, and plenty of people are waiting to punish them for trying. Mara's answer comes from Shirley Chisholm: if they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

No guest this week. Logan opens with good news, because that's the rule now (one story in three, minimum). A data center in the basement of a Geneva housing co-op runs on renewables and heats 6,000 homes with its exhaust. No air conditioning since 2013. Filtered outdoor air. The company just IPO'd to build more. Plus an "ephemeral mode" that leaves nothing on the server, and what the EU's June tech-sovereignty package has to do with any of it.

Then Mara brings her own research, with colleagues at Emmanuel College, and it doesn't stay good news for long. Generative AI use at work is up 85% in a year. The never-touched-it crowd is shrinking fast. But the gains are pooling with power users running teams of agents while everyone else is still cleaning up email. And the finding that stopped Logan cold: people using AI for work reported higher self-esteem months later. Logan's summary of the whole study: we're using it more and liking it less.

Which raises the uglier question. Who actually captures the productivity you generate? "Am I able to do this" and "am I expected to do this" are not the same question. Mara runs it through self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan) and lands on community. Learning pods. Folding chairs.

Also: Robert Frost ambushes Logan from seventh grade, a Latvian summer camp, Mara's APA main-stage confession, and intuition rust and cognitive surrender make a return.

Your assignment this week: grab three women. Start an AI book club where nobody has to do the reading.

On the 85%: it's stated two ways on tape. The precise version is that the share of people using generative AI at work at least monthly rose 85% in one year.

Next week: Ifeoma Ajunwa, author of The Quantified Worker. Mara tells one of her stories in this episode, a room full of formerly incarcerated men, and you'll hear why she's next.

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