The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age

David Brooks has spent decades writing about character and how it’s built. His recent piece in The Atlantic points that same lens at AI, and lands on a bracingly simple argument: “When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable.”

When anyone can summon a competent answer in seconds, the differentiator stops being how smart people are and becomes their relationship to mental effort, whether they lean into hard thinking or hand it off. Brooks borrows the psychological term “need for cognition” to sort us into three camps: people who relish a hard problem, “cognitive misers” who avoid one, and a large middle who’ll dig in only when they care enough. His warning is that AI could split that middle apart — some using the tools to think more, others quietly thinking less.

For those of us in workforce and economic-development, not to mention educators of any discipline, this is a sharp answer to “what should we actually be developing in people?” Agency and mental effort are not traits some of us do or do not have — they are daily choices, and we can learn to build them in ourselves and others. This is where mindset training comes in. When we choose a meaningful goal, effort becomes the default, rather than what we pass off.