Thinking as a Service

We turned software into Software as a Service, infrastructure into Infrastructure as a Service, and computing power into something we rent by the hour. Now we are moving toward something that could almost be called Thinking as a Service. We can rent assistance with remembering, researching, interpreting, reasoning, deciding, writing and communicating whenever we need it.

That can be incredibly useful. But combined with cognitive deskilling, it creates an interesting feedback loop. The better the rented capability becomes, the less reason there seems to be to maintain some of the capability ourselves. The less we practice it, the more useful the service becomes. Eventually convenience can produce dependency, and dependency makes the provider of the convenient thing considerably more powerful. This is not particularly exotic. We have watched the same transition from ownership to subscription happen across the digital economy.

The uncomfortable difference is what we may now be renting. A subscription to music changes how we access music. A subscription to cognitive infrastructure can change how we access our own ability to navigate information and make sense of the world. The important question is therefore not whether AI “really thinks”. It is what happens when more and more activities necessary for exercising human agency become services we increasingly depend on corporations to provide.