The Cognitive Revolution: we externalized our muscles, now we're externalizing our minds
Konstantine · x · 2026-09-02
A long-form essay "The Cognitive Revolution (When Machines Do The Thinking)" opens with the author's daily Waymo commute: the car does physical work (thousands of pounds of metal crossing the SF Bay Area) and cognitive work (reading the road and predicting, resulting in 17x fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers) — both muscle and mind externalized.
The ride encapsulates two revolutions: the physical one, 200 years old, and the cognitive one, barely begun. The mood around the second, the author notes, is a cocktail of optimism, skepticism and anxiety — singularity talk, recursive self-improvement, trillion-dollar clusters, superintelligence, unemployment and social disruption.
Related event: Sequoia's 'Cognitive Revolution' essay: AI outsources human thinking(4 posts)→
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