The Cognological Revolution
A short Q&A on why this moment is bigger than AI
Q: Is this just another technology shift, like smartphones or the internet?
No.
We are not living through a shift in tools. We are living through a shift in how thinking itself is structured.
Some moments in history don’t just add new capabilities, instead they change the underlying architecture of cognition: how thought is stored, shared, amplified, and acted upon.
Those moments are rare, disruptive, and irreversible. Right now is one of them.
Q: What do you mean by a “cognological” shift?
A cognological shift is a change in the infrastructure of thought, not just its content.
Human history has only seen a few of these:
Language made thought social and communal.
Writing made thought persistent across time.
Print made thought scalable across societies.
AI makes thought plastic; able to be generated, reshaped, recombined, and simulated.
These are not incremental improvements. They are changes to the operating system of civilisation.
Q: How is AI different from printing, exactly?
Print scaled information. AI transforms it.
In the Print era, information was:
Set: fixed once written
Scarce: expensive to reproduce
Sacred: controlled by institutions
AI collapses those assumptions. Information is now:
Soft: endlessly malleable
Suffused: widely & instantly available
Secular: no longer monopolised
This is why we are moving from the Printocene to the Post-Printocene. The shift is not speed, it is plasticity.
Q: What does “plastic” information actually mean?
It means information now behaves more like a mind than a book. It can:
be reworked in real time
respond to context
generate variations
explore possibilities
Information itself has acquired a form of neuroplasticity. This has never happened before.
Q: Isn’t AI just automating tasks faster?
That framing misses the point. AI does not simply replace tasks.
It acts as a cognitive prosthesis by extending the capabilities of thinking itself.
For the first time, the human brain is no longer the sole bottleneck in knowledge work.
We are moving from doing thinking to orchestrating thinking.
Q: That sounds powerful — but risky.
Correct. And inseparable.
Every cognological shift produces abundance and anxiety.
Print brought literacy, science, and democracy.
It also brought propaganda, bureaucracy, and surveillance.
AI carries the same duality:
liberation vs. dependency
insight vs. echo chambers
creativity vs. disorientation
The danger is not AI. The danger is in continuing to using a post-print system with print-era assumptions.
Q: What skills matter most in this new era?
Not coding. Not technical mastery. The core skill is Ludicity.
Ludicity is the disciplined capacity to:
explore
play
stress-test ideas
adapt inside a living information system
This is not gamification. It is how humans learn to inhabit new cognitive environments.
Those who treat AI as a tool will hit a ceiling. Those who engage it as a thinking environment will evolve.
Q: So where are we right now, historically?
We are in the compressed incunabula of a new age.
The unstable early decades where:
norms are unclear
institutions lag behind reality
anxiety is widespread
possibilities are vast
This phase feels chaotic because it is. But it is also where new ways of thinking are born.
Q: What is the real question we should be asking?
Not: “What will AI do?” But:
How must humans think — now that thinking itself has changed?
That is the core question of the Cognological Revolution.
Glossary
Cognologies are general-purpose information technologies that restructure cognition and society by changing the economics and mechanics of meaning: how information is produced, stored, transmitted, and validated. Historically, language, writing, and print each acted as a step-change in collective intelligence by massively increasing coordination bandwidth and cultural memory.
Printocene names the period in which printed text became the dominant cognitive infrastructure. Print stabilised information into repeatable, portable forms and encouraged institutional authority: canon formation, standardisation, credentialing, bureaucracy, and the idea of an “authorised” version. In this regime, information is culturally perceived as solid, scarce, and sacral—fixed, limited, and imbued with legitimacy by publication. Generative AI shifts the regime again. It doesn’t merely distribute text; it transforms it—compressing, generating, translating, and reconfiguring information interactively. This changes the felt nature of information toward soft, suffused, and secular: fluid rather than fixed, ambient rather than scarce, and no longer automatically authoritative simply because it appears in a textual form.
Ludicity is the emergent literacy for this new cognological regime: a capacity for exploratory, iterative sense-making—treating information as something to test, probe, and refine (rather than merely consume), while maintaining epistemic discipline (verification, provenance, and calibration of confidence). In this framing, the societal task is to evolve from print-trained reverence toward AI-era play with rigor.