(2026-07-17) Johnson Notebooks And The Extended Mind

Steven Johnson: Notebooks And The Extended Mind. A few weeks ago, the Sunday NY Times business section published a long reported piece called “Revenge Of The Philosophy Majors” written by my old friend Ben Wallace, documenting the unlikely recent trend of AI companies adding academic philosophers to their payrolls.

• The idea that a philosophy degree is a ticket to a lifetime of underemployment persists… But [recently] A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. 2026-07-05-TheRevengeOfThePhilosophyMajors

While my background is technically more on the side of history and media theory, I suppose it’s fair to say that my involvement with Google is adjacent to the trend Ben describes in his (wonderful) piece.

A few years ago, I described the trend using a slightly wider framing: as the revenge of the humanities, not just the philosophy majors. (2024-06-07) Johnson Revenge Of The Humanities

The core skills are not just about straight prompt engineering; they’re not just about figuring out the most efficient wording to get the model to do what you want. They also draw on deeper, more nuanced questions. What is the most responsible behavior to cultivate in the model, and how do we best deploy this technology in the real world to maximize its positive impact? What new forms of intelligence or creativity can we detect in these strange entities? How do we endow them with a moral compass, or steer them away from bias and inaccurate stereotypes? Can language alone generate a robust theory of how the world works, or do you need more explicit rules or additional sensory information?

they were all questions that belonged to the humanities until the language models came along

One of the heroes of Ben’s piece is NYU philosopher David Chalmers, whose writing and teaching has had a defining influence over the nascent field of AI philosophy. But in a way, I think Ben undersells Chalmers’ impact... big idea that Chalmers helped bring into the world—the extended mind theory—actually has enormous relevance to the here and now of AI circa 2026.

The core principle of the extended mind theory is one that will be familiar to Adjacent Possible readers: the 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. “Thinking” is something that happens inside and outside our brains

In their original 1998 paper, Chalmers and co-author Andy Clark argued for what they called an active externalism

The paper features an oft-cited thought experiment involving an Alzheimer’s patient named Otto:
Like many Alzheimer’s patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life.
Otto is constantly using his notebook as a matter of course. It is central to his actions in all sorts of contexts, in the way that an ordinary memory is central in an ordinary life

To say that the beliefs disappear when the notebook is filed away seems to miss the big picture… the information is reliably there when needed, available to consciousness and available to guide action, in just the way that we expect a belief to be.

One of the most provocative arguments in that original paper is that the human brain itself may have been specially adapted to work with these external “tools for thought”—starting with language itself

embracing extended cognition is a “core cognitive process” for humans, not just a modern invention.

To me, the most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low. The more pressing question is how you build an extended mind architecture that deepens your understanding and expands your creativity, given that there are promising, if slightly chaotic, tools for those tasks on the market right now, at the fingertips of billions of human beings.

we don’t have a lot of capital-P Philosophers on the team at Google Labs

In my little corner of Labs, I almost never hear the consciousness question discussed, even over a casual work lunch

But we do spend an enormous amount of our time exploring the possibility space around Chalmers and Clark’s extended mind concept. It’s not an accident we called our first consumer-facing product NotebookLM: as in the Otto thought experiment, the long history of notebooks in all their manifestations—commonplace books, journals, diaries—has always supplied the most powerful examples of the extended mind at work.

after Josh Woodward previewed Tailwind at I/O for the first time, we set about to give our little experiment a proper name. We had some branding consultants spend an afternoon with the team; we ideated and free associated and placed our post-it notes on the whiteboard

They didn’t sound like iconic Google names: Maps, Docs, Meet. Because of my long obsession with tools for thought and the extended mind, I had always been partial to simply calling it Notebook

But we were far too experimental and unproven to take on a name like Google Notebook

But at the time there happened to be another Labs experiment that had just launched called MusicLM, and so at some point in late May of 2023 it occurred to me that we could borrow that convention for our embryonic product, and call it NotebookLM.

I wrote an email to a few folks proposing the idea and included the caveat that if the product ever took off, and Google wanted to elevate us into the canon, we could drop the LM and just be Notebook. And so that’s the news. Three years and somewhere near a billion notebooks later, we are finally ditching the LM.