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Invisible Architectures of Thought: Toward a New Science of AI as Cognitive Infrastructure

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Giuseppe Riva

Outline

This paper identifies a lack of research on the pre-existing and fundamental impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) systems on human cognition and proposes a new interdisciplinary field of research, "Cognitive Infrastructure Studies (CIS)," to address this gap. CIS reconceptualizes AI as a "cognitive infrastructure"—a foundational system that influences human cognition, behavior, and knowledge. This cognitive infrastructure conveys meaning, operates through predictive personalization, and is characterized by adaptive invisibility, making its impact difficult to detect. Specifically, cognitive infrastructure automates "relevance judgments," shifting the cognitive subject to a non-human system. This paper illustrates how cognitive infrastructure reshapes human cognition, public reasoning, and social epistemology through narrative scenarios spanning individual (cognitive dependence), collective (democratic deliberation), and societal (governance) scales. CIS demands an unprecedented integration of diverse disciplinary methods to address how AI preprocessing reshapes distributed cognition across individual, collective, and cultural scales. It also addresses critical gaps between disciplines, including cognitive science's inability to analyze population-scale preprocessing, digital sociology's inability to access individual cognitive mechanisms, and computational approaches' inability to understand the dynamics of cultural transmission. To this end, CIS offers a methodological innovation for studying unseen algorithmic influences: the "infrastructure breakdown methodology," an experimental approach that exposes cognitive dependencies by systematically withdrawing AI preprocessing after a habituation period.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
Providing a new framework for understanding the pre-existing and fundamental impact of AI on human cognition.
The concept of cognitive infrastructure suggests the possibility of a multifaceted analysis of the social and cultural impact of AI.
A new methodology for detecting and analyzing the impact of cognitive infrastructure (infrastructure failure methodology) is presented.
Emphasize the need for integrated research across various academic disciplines
Limitations:
Further discussion is needed on the practical application and ethical implications of infrastructure failure methodologies.
Clarity is needed regarding the definition and scope of cognitive infrastructure.
Lack of specific implementation plans for integrated research across various academic fields
Lack of verification through large-scale empirical studies
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