The Cognitive Migration Myth 🚂
We’re being sold a shiny narrative: AI is the great equalizer, the upskilling revolution, the ticket to a utopian future where everyone wins. But peel back the Silicon Valley gloss, and you’ll find a far messier truth—this isn’t a migration, it’s a managed displacement. Harvard’s Christopher Stanton calls AI “extraordinarily fast-diffusing,” while Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis breathlessly compares it to the Industrial Revolution (but 10x faster, because why underpromise?). Meanwhile, workers are left standing at the station, wondering if the train is heading toward opportunity or oblivion.
The Willing vs. The Left Behind
There’s a stark divide:
- The Willing: Prompt whisperers, AI-powered hustlers, and corporate retoolers who’ve hitched their wagons to the hype train. For them, the future is navigable—even exhilarating.
- The Pressured: Everyone else, scrambling to decode a future where “adapt or die” feels less like advice and more like a corporate eulogy.
AI already accelerates coding 100x, drafts performance reviews, and deciphers ancient Latin (because, priorities). But for those outside the cult of automation, the message is clear: You’re not being upgraded—you’re being phased out.
The Glitch Behind the Curtain 🤖
Here’s the kicker: The tech driving this upheaval is still glitchy, unreliable, and prone to hallucinating like a sleep-deprived grad student. LLMs confidently spout nonsense, forget conversations mid-sentence, and can’t learn in any meaningful sense. Yet, we’re restructuring entire industries around them. Trust? In the U.S., only 32% of people believe in AI (compared to China’s 72%). Maybe because we’ve seen this movie before—AI winters don’t just kill hype; they leave careers in the rubble.
The Real Gamble
The bet isn’t just on better engineering—it’s on the hope that efficiency will outweigh human cost. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella shrugs that transformation is “messy.” Translation: Some of you will lose, and we’re fine with that. The dream? AI as a force for abundance. The reality? A high-speed exodus with no map—just faith that the destination won’t be a wasteland. So before we all cheerlead the “cognitive migration,” maybe we should ask: Who’s being left at the station—and who’s holding the tickets?