We Already Externalized Muscle. Now Mind.

For most of history, physical work was muscle. Then steam, combustion, and electric motors took it. Human muscle became a rounding error in the global energy budget. Cognitive work is on the same curve, compressed in time.

When the price of a scarce input collapses, supply floods and demand expands. Cheaper engines did not reduce coal use. They multiplied it. Cheaper cognition will not reduce thinking. It will multiply it. Most problems on Earth currently go unthought about because thinking is expensive.

Coding agents are the Spinning Jenny of this era: the first skilled craft where the human moved from performing the task to supervising it. The automobile of the Cognitive Revolution, the application that reshapes daily life, has probably not been built yet.

Employment follows the industrial pattern at higher speed. Categories disappear. New ones appear. The aggregate story can be abundant while the individual story is a generation-long loss. Education, clock time, and the commute were industrial inventions. Cheap cognition dissolves the teacher-student ratio and the cost of investigating long-tail disease. What remains economically human the longest is wanting, choosing, being accountable, and being trusted.

This Ledger Entry expands how the reader thinks by placing the current AI shock on the same curve as the Industrial Revolution, including the part that was true for the losers of the first wave.