— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I have begun to suspect that I am among those who relate to information the way a hunter-gatherer relates to terrain. I used to say that half as a joke, then, a few years ago, I came across a TedX talk exploring similar territory and suddenly felt a sense of recognition. I even felt seen In a way that I never had before that. An idea that had been drifting around in my own mind, half-formed and mostly private, was already out there, growing in the wild.

What feels newly significant is that the terrain itself may be changing. AI is rapidly transforming the landscape of information, and in doing so it may be making room for minds that move by exploration, association, and pursuit rather than strict linearity and routine.

That possibility hits close to home for me. I have severe ADHD, inattentive type. In the conventional language of institutions, that diagnosis tends to be framed in terms of deficits: difficulty sustaining attention in the approved way, difficulty organizing, difficulty regulating, difficulty complying with systems built on consistency, repetition, and administrative order. All of that is real enough. I know the friction well. But I also know what it feels like to scan a field of information and detect points of interest that other people miss, to catch a faint signal, a strange connection, a half-buried idea, and feel my whole mind orient toward it. I also know that this enables me to accomplish certain things reliably and consistently that other people struggle with.

I know what it feels like to move across a conceptual landscape not in a straight line, but by instinct, curiosity, pattern recognition, and pursuit. More often than not, that pursuit yields something: a useful idea, a buried historical thread, a revealing analogy, a pattern, or a new skill, that was not obvious until multiple fragments were placed beside each other. I follow the trail, gather what I can carry, and come back wanting to share it. That feels less like poor attention than a different style of attention entirely.

For most of modern life, the minds most rewarded by society have been the minds best suited to settled systems. Agricultural civilization privileged routine, seasonality, and repetition. Industrial civilization intensified the demand for punctuality, discipline, predictability, and standardization. Bureaucratic civilization refined those expectations into an architecture of forms, schedules, categories, and managed behavior. In such a world, the ideal mind is one that can remain on task, follow procedure, suppress distraction, and move in a straight line from assignment to completion. In many ways, modern civilization encourages people who behave like machines. Many ADHD minds simply do not move that way, but that does not necessarily mean they are broken. It may mean they are poorly matched to the dominant terrain. Modern society does not know how to turn neurodivergent people into a product, and that makes us outsiders.

This is part of why the hunter-gatherer metaphor has continued to haunt me. Not because I think ADHD is some secret superpower, and not because I want to romanticize a condition that can create real frustration, shame, and difficulty. The point is not that one kind of mind is superior in all contexts. The point is that every society quietly decides what kind of attention counts as normal, productive, trustworthy, and sane. Change the environment, and you may change the meaning of the trait. A mind that struggles in conditions of monotony may become highly effective in conditions of novelty. A mind that resists rigid sequencing may thrive in open-ended exploration. A mind that appears distractible in one context may actually be highly responsive to weak signals, unusual patterns, and opportunities at the edge of the map.

That is the possibility I cannot shake, and now AI enters the picture.

What makes this moment feel different is not simply that AI can rapidly answer questions. Search engines could already do that, at least in a crude way. What feels different is that AI is beginning to alter the texture of information itself. It lowers the cost of traversal. It speeds up synthesis. It helps compare, compress, reframe, translate, brainstorm, extend, and connect. It does not eliminate the need for judgment, taste, or discipline, but it changes the terrain on which those qualities are exercised.

For minds like mine, that matters. The old burden of the information age was not scarcity, but overwhelm. There was too much to read, too much to connect, too much to hold in working memory at once. Curiosity could become a trap. One interesting signal could lead to twelve tabs, thirty thoughts, and the familiar feeling of being both intensely engaged and structurally lost.

AI does not solve that problem entirely, but it does seem to create a new kind of partnership with exploratory attention. It allows a wandering mind to externalize some of the functions that once made wandering so costly. It can help hold threads in place while I move. It can help me return to a trail after I have sprinted down three others. It can help me compare fragments, surface patterns, and translate raw curiosity into something more shareable. It can make exploration more livable.

That matters not just practically, but existentially, because many neurodivergent people grow up internalizing the idea that their way of moving through the world is fundamentally wrong: too scattered, too intense, too nonlinear, too hard to manage, too difficult to integrate into the machinery. But what if some of us were never meant to function best as machinery? What if some minds are better understood as search parties? What if attention is not a single virtue, but a family of strategies? What if the hyperlinear mind and the exploratory mind are not simply better and worse versions of the same thing, but different adaptations to different terrains? And what if a civilization built on extraction, routine, and control has simply been better at rewarding one than the other?

I do not think AI will magically save us. Every technological shift creates new distortions along with new possibilities and AI is no exception. It will almost certainly be used in dehumanizing, exploitative, and intellectually flattening ways. It may deepen surveillance, accelerate mediocrity, generate new arms races and new forms of extraction. But even within that, I suspect something else is happening. A new informational ecology is emerging, and some of the minds long treated as ill-fitted to the old one may turn out to have unusual strengths within the new one. Not because they are flawless, and not because suffering becomes fake once it is philosophically reframed, but because there are forms and applications of intelligence that only become visible when the landscape changes.

Maybe that is part of what I have been feeling all along: not a deficit of mind, but a mismatch of terrain. And maybe, just maybe, some of us have who have been foragers of information this whole time will find a crucial role in navigating this unexplored territory.