Cognitive Relocation

When Andrew Ure described the factory of 1835 as “a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs,” the phrase intellectual organs was deliberate and exact. He meant that the cognitive functions previously performed by individual craftsmen—the judgements about material quality, the decisions about process sequence, the evaluations of output—had not been eliminated. They had been relocated: absorbed into the design of the machinery itself, made permanent and repeatable rather than variable and negotiable. The handloom weaver’s trained sensitivity to thread tension did not disappear when the power loom arrived; it was encoded into the loom’s mechanism, made available without the weaver, and therefore made free of the weaver’s bargaining power. Cognitive relocation is the precise mechanism behind the structural fact that every wave of industrial automation produces the same distributional outcome: the value of cognition is preserved and even amplified, but the humans who previously performed that cognition are