Cognition for Sale!

There’s something deeply dishonest about the way we’re talking about the AI industry right now.

We keep hearing that this is about innovation, about progress, about unlocking human potential, but let’s be real for a moment. From where I’m standing, as a human being living in an actual society, raising actual children who will need actual jobs in the future, this is not just about convenience or productivity. This is about power.

Because what’s being built right now is not simply a tool that helps people write emails faster or generate pretty images for marketing campaigns. It is an infrastructure that is quietly but aggressively replacing cognitive labor at a scale we have never seen before in human history.

Not factory labor. Not repetitive manual tasks. Human thought itself. 

And the question nobody wants to seriously ask is: What happens to a society where millions of young people are told from the beginning that their ability to think, learn, create, code, design, organize, analyze - all those things they were promised would make them valuable - can now be done faster, cheaper, and at scale by systems owned by a handful of corporations?

Because let’s follow this through. Young people entering the workforce already face:

-skyrocketing housing costs

-unstable employment

-student debt

-gig-based insecurity

-declining social safety nets

Now imagine entering that same world knowing that entire sectors - from customer support, to design, to programming, to journalism, to legal assistance, to accounting - are being gradually automated by companies whose primary legal responsibility is not to society, but to their shareholders.

That means fewer entry-level roles, fewer training positions, fewer ladders to climb.

And when the ladder disappears, people don’t just politely accept it. We are talking about a generation full of energy, creativity, ambition and hope being structurally excluded from meaningful economic participation. A generation told to study hard, adapt, reskill, learn to code, become digital natives… only to find that the finish line keeps moving because the very tools they were told to master are now mastering the tasks themselves.

At the same time, the economic gains from this automation don’t magically distribute themselves. They concentrate and flow toward platform owners, data holders, infrastructure providers and capital investors.

We’ve seen this pattern before with globalization and financialization where productivity goes up, corporate profits go up, but wages stagnate and insecurity expands. Except this time, the speed is different. And speed matters. Because social systems - education, labor policy, welfare states - move slowly. They were designed for industrial-era transitions that unfolded over decades. But this transition is unfolding over years. And soon, months.

So what happens when all those expected opportunities disappear, when people continue to see an increase in wealth concentration, when safety nets weaken and millions of young people feel like they have no stake in the system they’re expected to uphold?

Well, history gives us an uncomfortable answer. Disillusionment breeds instability. Instability breeds anger.

And anger, when combined with economic exclusion and technological awareness, can quickly and violently lead to unrest.

This isn’t about pessimism, it’s about incentives. If a system systematically produces winners who hoard and hoard and losers who are told to wait for benefits that never arrive, eventually the losers stop waiting.

And when the people who feel they have no future are also the youngest, strongest, most connected generation in history and fully aware of the inequality around them, the potential for social rupture becomes very real.

The technology that's being built is extraordinary. That´s true. But unless societies are equally serious about redistribution, job transition, universal safety nets, public investment and democratic oversight, we are definitely at risk of creating a world where intelligence itself - cognition - becomes privatized infrastructure and where participation in society becomes a gated privilege that no longer guarantees a decent life to those billions of our future generations. Yes, billions. And a society that tells its youth that they are no longer needed should not be surprised when its youth begin to question the legitimacy of the society itself.

Therefore, sleep lightly. For the first time in history, we have finally built a god that does not need us, and we are handing it the keys to the world while we still think we are the ones in charge. When the lights of human utility finally go out, the silence won't be one of peace, it will be the sound of a billion voices realizing, too late, that they are no longer the protagonists of their human story.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas