DUBAI—In his seminal 1956 paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” American psychologist George Miller made a deceptively simple argument: our working memory can hold only seven pieces of information at once. In effect, Miller identified a hard constraint on the human mind’s processing capacity, showing that short-term cognition operates within surprisingly narrow limits.

At roughly the same time, the Nobel laureate economist Herbert A. Simon arrived at a strikingly similar conclusion. His theory of bounded rationality held that decision-makers never optimize in the sense that classical economics imagines, because cognition itself is a scarce resource. Faced with more variables than they can simultaneously process, human beings do not search for the best possible answer. Instead, they settle for an answer that is good enough within the limits of their cognitive resources. As Simon put it, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

In the 1980s, educational psychologist John Sweller pushed this logic further with his cognitive load theory. Sweller’s theory holds that when informational demands exceed the limits of working memory, the mind becomes overwhelmed and performance deteriorates.

Despite approaching the problem from different directions, Miller, Simon, and Sweller all described the same underlying condition: a widening gap between the complexity of modern societies and people’s cognitive capacities.

It was against this backdrop that heterodox economists in the early 2000s began to argue that capitalism was entering a new phase. In an influential 2005 paper, Carlo Vercellone — an economist at Université de Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis — drew on Karl Marx’s concept of the “general intellect” to contend that collective human intelligence has displaced the factory as the central engine of value creation, giving rise to what he termed “cognitive capitalism.”

But Vercellone’s thesis extended beyond the rise of the knowledge economy. Capital, he argued, could never fully own or control the most productive dimensions of cognition: tacit knowledge, relational judgment, and lived experience. Unlike machinery, knowledge could not be fully separated from the workers who possessed it and thus could not be codified into procedures or transferred at will. Cognition, in his view, remained the one productive input resistant to complete commodification precisely because it was irreducibly human.

Vercellone, of course, could not have foreseen the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Before the emergence of large language models, the limits of codifying human cognition manifested as informational overload: too many variables to process, too much data to interpret, and too much complexity for workers and decision-makers to navigate. Today, however, what once seemed inseparable from human intellect can increasingly be extracted, replicated, and deployed at scale.

In a sense, AI has introduced a form of cognitive compression, or “zipping,” that converts tacit human understanding—once confined to individuals and institutions—into something that can be sold by the token.........

© The Korea Times