Maggie Jackson

The author who made uncertainty wise — she’s back, for more on Unknowing.

Rigorous, literary, calm, humorous, humane. Makes a room slow down and speed up at the same time. 

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist who writes about the cognitive capacities humans need in order to flourish. Distracted, her book on attention, arrived well before the attention economy was something everyone complained about. Uncertain, published in 2023, argues that not-knowing is a skill rather than a deficit — a state you can get better at, which fuels insight, creativity and resilience under pressure.

She separates two kinds of uncertainty that get muddled constantly: what we cannot know, and what we do not know yet. They call for completely different responses, and most of the stress people carry comes from treating the first as though it were the second.

She returns as a favorite from 2025, and this year she'll be defending the fragile capacities — attention, doubt, depth, patience — that technology erodes quietly and by default, and making the case for why the discomfort of not knowing is worth protecting.

You'll take away: a practical tolerance for ambiguity. She teaches a posture you can hold in a meeting where nobody has the answer: stay in the question longer, resist the premature close, and notice when a confident machine answer is doing your thinking for you.

ONE WATCH OR LISTEN — Maggie Jackson on Uncertain, with us at Artificiality. Her book won an Artificiality Book Award; the episode covers the neuroscience of uncertainty and why we crave certainty anyway.