You don’t remember phone numbers anymore. I don’t either.
We have, as a species, collectively agreed to outsource that small sliver of our memory to a silicon slab in our pocket. This isn’t a complaint; it’s a convenience. But it’s also a symptom of a much larger process, one we’re barely noticing. We are in the early, deceptively pleasant stages of cognitive offloading.
We offload our sense of direction to the GPS, our factual recall to Google, and, increasingly, our analytical reasoning to generative AI. We are trading cognitive friction for cognitive ease, and it feels good. But this frictionless convenience is, I believe, the single most dangerous, insidious threat of the 21st century.
We are all worried about the wrong AGI. We’re obsessed with a malicious “Terminator” AGI that will take power from us. We are completely ignoring the far more likely, benevolent AGI that will take responsibility from us. An AGI that we will willingly give our agency to, one frictionless decision at a time, until we have none left to give. This is the path to the Cognitive Conservatorship. And the scariest part? We’re already on it.
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