Notebooks And The Extended Mind

Steven Johnson · 16 Jul 2026 · adjacentpossible.substack.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The external tools people use to reason, remember and calculate — including chatting with an LLM — are genuine extensions of the human mind, not just aids to it.

Their wordsthe external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate-from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM-should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process.
Our reading
Current AI systems are very unlikely to be close to achieving genuine sentience.

Their wordsthe most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low.