The Cognitive Landlord

Perhaps the better metaphor for our relationship with AI is not assistant but landlord. Not because a company literally owns our thoughts, but because more and more of the infrastructure through which we access information, store knowledge, navigate the world, communicate and increasingly reason about things belongs to somebody else. We are tenants in systems whose rules we did not write.

A cognitive landlord does not need to tell you what to think. That would be crude and unnecessarily difficult. It is enough to own enough of the environment in which thinking increasingly happens. The landlord determines which capabilities exist, what they cost, which uses are permitted, what gets changed, what disappears and how much of what happens inside the building can be observed. You may have enormous freedom inside your rented apartment. The asymmetry appears when you need something from the owner.

That is why dependency matters more to me than fantasies about mind control. Power rarely requires controlling every individual decision. Often it is enough to own something other people cannot easily do without. If cognitive infrastructure becomes increasingly rented rather than collectively governed or independently maintained, we should perhaps pay considerably more attention to the landlord.