Title: METEORAITE: Evolution of a Species in a New Ecosystem
Tags: cognitive-atrophy, skill-divide
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The core book of the series treats artificial intelligence as an **ecological factor**: neither a tool nor an adversary, but a change of environment that alters the conditions in which people think, learn and decide, with no intention behind it. The book is descriptive by design. It says that it offers no solutions and no reassurance, and calls its stance "cognitive realism".

The first eight chapters retell the history of technology as a series of externalizations: fire moved the cost of survival from the body to the environment, agriculture from the present to the future, writing from the mind to an outside support. Craft, industry, the engine, the computer and the internet follow. Each chapter looks at the individual, the group, the community, the state and the species, and draws a lesson. The recurring one is that what is externalized stops developing internally, and that every gain in power carries a loss that is at first invisible.

AI is the meteorite because it externalizes reasoning itself. From here the book applies the author's concepts: **False Cognitive Power Transfer**, the feeling of competence without the process that builds it, illustrated by the carpenter with a pneumatic hammer; the psychological ceiling; and **cognitive divergence** between Passengers, Operators and Architects, with the simulated ratio of 71 to 1. The relationship between a person and an AI is described as a functional bond that changes how one thinks, and as irreversible. Chapters on extinctions and emergences list the roles and structures that the new environment stops rewarding and those it favours.

The last part sets continuity against fragmentation and presents **Minimal Ethical Governance** as mitigation, not control: eight principles, among them human decision, the right to slow down and contestability, together with a plain list of what MEG cannot solve. The book states three conditions that would invalidate its thesis by 2028 and ends with local hardware as the means of "fragmenting" the meteorite.