The Epistemology of Cognitive Uploading
Steven Johnson, Artificial Intelligence, and the Evolution of Augmented Cognition
A brief housekeeping note at the start. I am changing the publishing schedule for The Augmented Educator: new essays will now arrive every Thursday in early access for paid subscribers, then become free to everyone the following Tuesday.
My thanks to all of you for your continued interest and support. I truly appreciate it.
Michael G. Wagner (The Augmented Educator)
There are perhaps two ideas that shaped how I think about media and technology more than any others. One is Clayton Christensen’s account of disruptive innovation. The other is Steven Johnson’s “Sleeper Curve.” I came to the second in the early 2000s, when I was writing about computer games and trying to argue that the medium did real intellectual work, something many critics refused to acknowledge.
At that time, Johnson had already made that case, and he made it more persuasively than I could. That is why, when he speaks, I have learned to listen.
What has stayed with me from Johnson’s earlier work is not any single verdict about video games but a habit of mind. It is the recognition that our judgments about what is valuable and what counts as genuine thinking are far less stable than they feel from the inside. What looks self-evident in its moment—that comic books rot the brain or that video games cause real-world violence—has a way of looking outdated a generation later.
That instability is worth holding onto right now, because we are once again being told, with enormous confidence, exactly how a new technology is destroying our minds.
Johnson also happens to be the co-founder and editorial director of Google’s NotebookLM, so his interest in AI is that of a builder, not a bystander. His view comes down to a single phrase: cognitive uploading. The phrase inverts the anxiety that runs through nearly every conversation about AI, and that inversion is a far heavier lift than it first sounds.
The Sleeper Curve as a method
The Sleeper Curve was the organizing argument of Johnson’s 2005 book Everything Bad Is Good for You. The title is a wink at Woody Allen’s Sleeper, in which scientists of the future are baffled that twentieth-century humans never appreciated the health benefits of deep-fried food and cream pies.
