Gary Grossman, Edelman

When I write about the cognitive migration now underway, brought about by the rapid advance of gen AI, I do so from the perspective of someone who has spent four decades in the technology industry. My own journey runs from coding business applications in Fortran and COBOL to systems analysis and design, IT project management, enterprise systems consulting, computing hardware sales and technology industry communications. All of it has been centered in the U.S., although I have collaborated with colleagues and clients across Europe and Asia.

At a recent Washington AI summit, policymakers grappled with warnings of massive job displacement and a potential “white-collar bloodbath” with millions of jobs possibly vanishing within five years. Policymakers offered potential remedies, from a publicly funded “AI Academy” to a national trust fund financed by tech companies. Together, the warnings and proposals reflected a common recognition: Intelligence is becoming ambient, while the human stakes for people remain unclear and unresolved.

We are now squarely within the cognitive era, as evidenced by a recent report showing almost 10% of the global population using ChatGPT every week, generating billions of interactions with AI. Including users of other leading chatbots, the numbers are far greater and still growing. Another recent report shows that AI is permeating society much faster “and with greater intensity than the diffusion of technologies [such as personal computers and the Internet] in the 20th century.”

A near shore with ingrained AI is already in view, and it carries both promise and peril. There are now clear signs of how AI will dramatically improve the quality of life and equally omens for how this advance could create an "Elysium" style dystopia. As for where the journey leads, we are still looking through a glass darkly.

The debate over AI consciousness is back. Mustafa Suleyman, a leading AI executive, recently said that “seemingly conscious AI” is on the horizon. These are systems that, through ongoing enhancements including more persistent memory, will feel alive in their interactions even if they are not. The modifier is intended to calm, insisting that they only seem conscious. Yet history shows that seeming is never trivial. It is enough to unsettle and disrupt.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 has arrived, bringing faster performance, more dependable reasoning and stronger tool use. It joins Claude Opus 4.1 and other frontier models in signaling a rapidly advancing cognitive frontier. While artificial general intelligence (AGI) remains in the future, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis has described this era as “10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and maybe 10 times faster.”

Cognitive migration is underway. The station is crowded. Some have boarded while others hesitate, unsure whether the destination justifies the departure.

When my wife recently brought up AI in a masterclass for coaches, she did not expect silence. One executive coach eventually responded that he found AI to be an excellent thought partner when working with clients. Another coach suggested that it would be helpful to be familiar with the Chinese Room analogy, arguing that no matter how sophisticated a machine becomes, it cannot understand or coach the way humans do. And that was it. The conversation moved on.

AI represents the greatest cognitive offloading in the history of humanity. We once offloaded memory to writing, arithmetic to calculators and navigation to GPS. Now we are beginning to offload judgment, synthesis and even meaning-making to systems that speak our language, learn our habits and tailor our truths.

Image generated by ChatGPT.

In the blog post The Gentle Singularity, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman painted a vision of the near future where AI quietly and benevolently transforms human life. There will be no sharp break, he suggests, only a steady, almost imperceptible ascent toward abundance. Intelligence will become as accessible as electricity. Robots will be performing useful real-world tasks by 2027. Scientific discovery will accelerate. And, humanity, if properly guided by careful governance and good intentions, will flourish.

Cognitive migration is not just an individual journey; it is also a collective and institutional one. As AI reshapes the terrain of thought, judgment and coordination, the very foundations of our schools, governments, corporations and civic systems are being called into question.