CONCEPT
Cognitive Resource Depletion
The application of Diamond's resource depletion framework to human expertise itself — the tacit knowledge, judgment capacity, and mentorship capacity being consumed faster than it is being replenished in the AI-augmented cognitive economy.
Cognitive resource depletion is the extension of Diamond's resource-depletion framework from ecological systems to the human expertise that sustains professional practice, institutional judgment, and the intergenerational transmission of tacit knowledge. The claim is that AI-augmented workflows, by substituting machine output for the friction-rich experience through which tacit knowledge forms, are depleting the stock of deep expertise at a rate that exceeds the rate of replenishment — and that the depletion is invisible, self-reinforcing, and potentially catastrophic on the specific pattern Diamond documented in ecological cases.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The resource being depleted is not knowledge of facts (which AI possesses in greater breadth than any human) or knowledge of procedures (which AI can execute more reliably than most practitioners). The resource is tacit knowledge — the embodied, pattern-recognitive, judgment-based capacity that decades of friction-rich practice deposit in a practitioner's nervous system. A senior software architect's ability to sense that a system design