Esther Dyson on information overload
From Use AI. Don't let it use you: Esther Dyson on human limits in an age of artificial scale · · StartUp Health
“There's information diabetes, which destroys your mind's ability to process good information. So, you consume it, but you don't absorb it or digest it. And then there's money diabetes, which destroys your moral fiber by turning it too focused on money, which has no value, only valuation, and get stuck into this vortex.”
On , Esther Dyson, Founder of EDventures at EDventure Holdings, spoke about information overload during Use AI. Don't let it use you: Esther Dyson on human limits in an age of artificial scale on StartUp Health.
About Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson, founder of EDventure Holdings, has been promoting her forthcoming book *Term Limits: Human Time and AI Scale* in recent appearances. In a June 2026 podcast for StartUp Health, Dyson discussed the concept of "information diabetes," which she described as a condition that "destroys your mind's ability to process good information." She argued that people should "use AI" but not "let it use you," and advocated for universal basic income and universal basic service, saying that "something universal basic service that makes everybody spend 2 years before adulthood living and working in a place that's completely unlike where they grew up." Dyson also expressed support for single-payer health care, stating that "you can't expect poor people to be able to fund the flourishing of their own children" and that such flourishing is "a public value." At the BIG.AI@MIT conference in April 2026, Dyson spoke with MIT IDE Director Sinan Aral about the risks of confusing "what is measurable with what is valuable" in the age of AI. She proposed the creation of a "GDVP, the gross domestic value produced," which would subtract items like "half the food supply, a third of health care spending, gambling, opioids" from economic measures. Dyson also emphasized that companies using AI should carry liability insurance and disclose that to investors, and she urged audiences not to "outsource what's important," particularly the ethics of a business.