For most of human history, intelligence was scarce. Thinking took time, insight arrived slowly and it was shaped by lived experience. Cognition had friction, and this friction gave it substance and weight.

Today, that assumption is collapsing.

Artificial intelligence has, to use another ubiquitous word, made cognition precariously abundant. Answers arrive instantly and patterns surface with little to no effort. Judgment is technologically packaged and delivered with a confidence that increasingly rivals, if not often exceeds our own. My central point here is that this isn't simply another technological advance but marks the first time human cognition itself appears to be on the obsolescence curve.

We have replaced tools before, but we have never replaced thinking.

That's why this moment feels different to me. AI isn't extending human effort in the way machines once extended muscle or speed. It's occupying territory we once assumed was uniquely human that includes reasoning, synthesis, interpretation. In many domains, AI often performs these functions better than we do. And this is a claim many resist, because it contradicts how we have always understood progress—generally slow, incremental, and........

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