Dr. Danielle Perszyk, a cognitive scientist at Amazon’s AGI Labs, can’t help but feel anxious every time she opens her computer, where she is greeted by all the usual pop-up nonsense: email alerts, Slack messages, social media updates, “productivity” app notifications. Of course, her frustration with these distractions was hardly evident in the 45 minutes we spent chatting about her research. But it’s certainly one of the factors driving her interest in A.I. “I think that part of the solution is making the tech go more in the background,” she told me, noting the irony of developing new technologies designed to make older technologies less obtrusive.