News Summary

• AI is doing what no previous technology could, turning tacit human knowledge into a product that can be extracted, priced, and distributed at scale.
• Yet the same technology that democratizes cognitive labor may also weaken the human capacities on which complex societies depend.
• In his seminal 1956 paper “ The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” American psychologist George Miller made a deceptively simple argument: our working memory can hold only seven pieces of information at once.
• In effect, Miller identified a hard constraint on the human mind’s processing capacity, showing that short-term cognition operates within surprisingly narrow limits.