Monoculture farming collapsed entire food supplies. I do believe we risk doing the same thing to corporate cognition.
Today I read a thesis drawing on Gödel’s ‘Incompleteness’ Theorems to argue that AI, by accelerating the construction of purely logical systems, will expose the rigidity and fragility of our cognitive and organizational structures.
It is a loose but quite interesting analogy because it instinct instinctively points at something real that AI adoption ignores entirely.
When every organization offloads cognition to similar AI systems, which are trained on the same data, optimized for the same benchmarks and metrics, what you get is a cognitive monoculture at organizational (and societal) scale.
Let’s call it algorithmic monocropping.
Agriculture learned that with Irish potatoes or American bananas that if a system optimized only for one output, it becomes catastrophically fragile as soon a single point of failure arises.
Corporate (and societal) AI adoption is repeating this mistake – not because AI is dangerous, but because uniform AI adoption as we observe today will by definition eliminate the cognitive variance that previously made organizations resilient.
Individual atrophy is bad enough (offloading thinking makes you worse at thinking). But individuals work in organizations or run countries, and this is where collective atrophy becomes a serious problem. A company whose judgement layer will rely entirely on a ChatGPT 6 or Claude Opus 5 model, will share the same points of failure as every other company doing the same thing.
The biggest advantage over the next decade will not accrue to individuals that adopt AI the fastest, but ironically to those who maintain their cognitive sovereignty – and to organizations who preserve their cognitive “biodiversity” alongside it. If you are capable to reason independently when models converge to the same average answer – you have a competitive advantage.
The scariest is that monocultures don’t fail gradually but ALL AT ONCE.
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