🔮 Exponential View #563: The Citrini craze; human cognition; the most aggressive AI regulation; OpenAI spikes; COBOL returns; bye‑bye tax filing++

This post originally appeared in Exponential View and was written by Azeem Azhar.

“The collateral damage of railroads cannot be ignored, but nor can the fact that they didn’t just kill the canal companies; they also created an entirely new geography of economic possibility.”

The future of human cognition

This past week, I convened the first AI Vistas dialogue, designed so that even the experts in the room learn by engaging with each other on one hard question. In our first dialogue, I explored Are we in charge of our AI tools or are they in charge of us? with Nicholas Thompson, Eric Topol, Rohit Krishnan and Nita Farahany. A few themes that stood out to me:

• Autonomy is no longer simply “I chose this,” but “I chose this with a cognitive exoskeleton that is steerable, hackable, and designed by others.”

• Everyone has a generative core that must be protected from offloading to AI. We should all understand where our best thinking happens and ring-fence it from automation.

• As AI takes over the “visible” work, human institutions must focus on invisible work: building attention, intuition, social and embodied skills.

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The billion-dollar overreaction

Citrini, a research shop, published a speculative Substack post about the logical extreme of where AI disruption might take us. Their 2028 scenario has agentic tools letting developers clone mid-market SaaS in weeks, collapsing software pricing power overnight. This alarms other firms, which cut white-collar headcount and double down on AI. The dynamic continues to eat away at the demographic responsible for 75% of discretionary consumer spending. By 2028, they suggest unemployment at 10.2%, the S&P down 38%.