The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The fundamental change that may be taking place – humans may not be best characterized as the tool-creating animal but as the only animal that has figured out how to outsource its cognition — how to spread its cognitive abilities into the outside world. We’ve been doing that for a little while ten thousand years. Reading and writing is outsourcing of memory. So we have a process going on here, and you can watch to see whether it’s ongoing. So, for instance, in the next ten years, if you notice more and more substitution for using fragments of human cognition in the outside world — if human occupational responsibility becomes more and more automated in areas involving judgment that haven’t yet been automated — then what you’re seeing is rather like a rising tide of this cognitive outsourcing. That would actually be a very powerful symptom.