Cognification

The first industrial revolution took the power of human muscle and distributed it across machines: looms, engines, turbines, generators. Every factory, farm, and home eventually acquired access to mechanized force that would have required dozens of workers to replicate by hand. The economic and social consequences took a century to stabilize, because the institutions, labor laws, educational systems, and cultural norms required to distribute the gains of electrification toward broad benefit had to be built piece by piece, through conflict and compromise, against the inertia of arrangements that the new power had made obsolete. Kevin Kelly proposes that a structurally parallel transition is now underway. Large language models and their successors are distributing cognitive capability the way electrification distributed physical capability—making intelligence cheap, flexible, and available to anyone with a connection and a subscription, at a cost that would have been incomprehensible five years ago. The process Kelly calls cognification is the distribution of this capability across