Let’s talk about the moment Big Blue decided to rebrand obsolescence as innovation. Back in 2015, IBM’s then-CEO Ginni Rometty stood on a Gartner stage and declared the dawn of the “Cognitive Era”—a masterclass in corporate spin that would make even the slickest PR flacks blush. Watson, IBM’s glorified trivia bot, had already crushed Jeopardy! champions, but the real magic trick wasn’t AI—it was convincing Fortune 500 execs that augmented intelligence (read: your job, but cheaper) was a collaboration, not a coup.
The Great Bait-and-Switch 🎣
IBM’s pitch? “AI won’t replace you—it’ll make you better!” A comforting lie. What they really meant: “Your ‘cognitive labor’—diagnosing, analyzing, lawyering—is now a training dataset.” Watson wasn’t a co-pilot; it was the first corporate Trojan horse for white-collar automation.
The Speedrun of Human Irrelevance ⏱️
Fast-forward to today: LLMs digest legal briefs, diagnose patients, and write code—faster, cheaper, and without benefits. IBM’s “Cognitive Era” wasn’t wrong; it was just early. The migration from human-centric to algorithmic labor isn’t coming—it’s here. And unlike the Industrial Revolution’s century-long runway, this shift’s happening before your next performance review. The irony? The only “augmented” thing was IBM’s stock price—while the rest of us got a front-row seat to our own obsolescence. Cheers to progress. 🥂