Surrendering our Cognitive Sovereignty

When I think of deindustrialization, I think small-America factory towns — once bustling hubs that supported local families, communities, and businesses, all contributing to the nation’s economic output. The demand for products they once manufactured never ceased; steel from Rust Belt cities and textiles from the Carolinas remain as vital as ever. No, these productive roles were outsourced to cheap labor in foreign lands, leaving generational devastation in their wake.

This sharp industrial decline of the 1970s coincided with the dawn of a new form of decline: Thinking. Math problems – once the domain of productive thought – were quickly jettisoned to their own form of outsourcing: The pocket calculator. Arguably the first digital assistant, it ushered in the deindustrialization of the mind. As we clamored for these convenient copilots – from calculators to computers to cell phones to chat-apps – we inevitably surrendered our ‘cognitive sovereignty’. And along the way, our minds became as depleted as those barren factory wastelands — themselves symbols of a lost national sovereignty — until both became virtually indistinguishable. 

At least during the halcyon days of the early pocket calculator, we could argue that innovation sparked a kind of ‘creative destruction‘. But no longer. If we imagine our minds as enclosed systems, much like how physicists define and enclose their systems, then all we can claim now is destruction. Because AI – and especially Generative AI – doesn’t create within the mind — it, too, is outsourced labor, manufacturing content somewhere else.

***

Tonight’s musical offering: