AI RESEARCH
The Cognitive Divergence: AI Context Windows, Human Attention Decline, and the Delegation Feedback Loop
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2603.26707v1 Announce Type: cross This paper documents and theorises a self-reinforcing dynamic between two measurable trends: the exponential expansion of large language model (LLM) context windows and the secular contraction of human sustained-attention capacity. We term the resulting asymmetry the Cognitive Divergence. AI context windows have grown from 512 tokens in 2017 to 2,000,000 tokens by 2026 (factor ~3,906; fitted lambda = 0.59/yr; doubling time ~14 months.