Slouching Towards Sensemaking

The risk isn’t technological determinism – it’s institutional drift. We’ll wake up in five years and realize we’ve rebuilt our entire knowledge ecosystem around tools whose effects we never properly examined. The architecture of our collective sensemaking will have shifted in ways we can’t easily undo.

The risk isn’t that these tools will make us stupid. It’s that they’ll make us differently-abled in ways we don’t fully understand. We’re trading certain cognitive capacities for others without a clear map of what we’re giving up or gaining. I see this in my own work. I reach for ChatGPT reflexively now when I’m stuck on a problem. Sometimes it gen