All of the novels. Paintings. Research papers. All those unfortunate social media posts you made at 2 AM. Photos. Videos. All of it …

… centuries of people thinking hard about stuff, serious and strange … all of that finished cognitive work is just sitting there like raw material to be extracted and repurposed. These cognitive artifacts are the residue of thought. It’s like they’re in massive data warehouses waiting to get processed.

When AI (machine learning, GenAI, etc.) consolidates all that cognitive work, it picks what’s predictable and efficient, and it sidelines everything else because homogeneity scales the easiest.

These systems don’t think (at least not yet). They automate the data warehouse.

Machine-speed decision-making outpaces human deliberation by a lot … which is a problem.

The big questions:

Who benefits from the cognitive “work” AI performs?

Who pays the electric bills?

Who pays the water bills?

Who pockets the profits?

Who can afford the increased rent and property taxes as data centers occupy more land?