AI替代思维会累积认知债务，导致系统性脆弱加剧。
Cognitive Debt: AI as Intellectual Leverage and the Dynamics of Systemic Fragility
- 用认知资本与债务建模，揭示AI替代引发的隐性风险
- 理性个体因短期收益而积累正债务，系统脆弱性随时间上升
- 适合关注AI治理、技术风险与认知可持续性的研究者
我们构建了认知债务的正式理论：当个体将AI作为对第一性原理认知的替代而非补充时，未验证推理义务的累积便形成认知债务。模型中每位个体具有两个状态变量——认知资本与认知债务，其生产技术为乘法形式，认知资本充当抵押品以决定AI采纳回报。我们提出六条命题：理性主体因成本延迟、部分外部化及短期生产率提升而产生正认知债务；平静时期降低主观风险评估，提高AI替代强度并放大杠杆，引发认知明斯基时刻——主观风险下降而真实系统脆弱性上升；预期危机损失在总杠杆上呈凸性；危机后产出目标压力可能诱发‘虚假修正’循环，即用更多AI修补AI失败；去中心化均衡下，由于系统性风险、认知公共品缺失与军备竞赛外部性，替代型AI采用过度于社会最优水平；在双类型异质主体经济中，高认知资本个体更密集采用AI，甚至可能使其无辅助认知资本降至初始低技能者之下。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We develop a formal theory of cognitive debt: the stock of unverified reasoning obligations that accumulates when individuals use AI as a substitute rather than a complement for first-principles cognition. The model features two state variables per agent, cognitive capital and cognitive debt, and a multiplicative production technology in which cognitive capital functions as collateral that determines the return to AI adoption. We establish six propositions. Rational agents incur positive cognitive debt because the costs are deferred, partially external, and masked by short-run productivity gains. Tranquil periods lower subjective risk assessments, raise AI substitution intensity, and compound leverage, generating a cognitive Minsky moment in which subjective risk falls while true systemic fragility rises. Expected crisis losses are convex in aggregate leverage. Post-crisis, output-target pressure can produce a false-correction loop in which agents patch AI failures with more AI. The decentralised equilibrium over-adopts substitutive AI relative to the social optimum because of systemic risk, cognitive public goods, and arms-race externalities. In a two-type heterogeneous-agent economy, high-cognitive-capital agents adopt AI more intensively and may eventually erode their unaided cognitive capital below that of initially lower-skilled agents.
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