CONCEPT
Cognitive Sustainability
Feenberg's proposed regulatory framework for AI: standards analogous to environmental protection, requiring AI systems to support users' long-term cognitive development rather than merely their immediate productivity.
Cognitive sustainability names a proposed institutional framework for governing AI systems that operates on analogy with environmental protection. Just as environmental regulation requires industrial processes to account for ecological externalities that market pricing cannot capture, cognitive sustainability would require AI systems to account for cognitive externalities — the atrophy of judgment, the erosion of deliberative capacity, the depletion of attentional resources — that engagement and satisfaction metrics cannot capture. The framework treats the cognitive environment of a society as a public good whose degradation is a collective harm, even when no individual user experiences the degradation as such.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The analogy to environmental regulation is not decorative. If AI systems produce cognitive externalities — if their design choices collectively shape the cognitive capacities of the populations using them — then there is a public interest in regulating those externalities precisely as there is a public interest in regulating physical pollution. The design choices embedded in AI systems affect not only individual