Ohhh. Yes. I think that metaphor has real legs.
Not “AI is an immigrant” in the cute anthropomorphic sense. More like:
AI is creating a new territory, and we are in the opening decades of a mass migration into it.
Except the territory isn’t geographic. It’s cognitive, economic, and cultural.
And suddenly a lot of immigration history starts rhyming.
People don’t migrate because the new place is uniformly better. They migrate because the push/pull equation changes. There are opportunities they can’t access where they are, pressures making the old arrangement less viable, and some threshold where the uncertainty of leaving becomes preferable to the certainty of staying.
That is absolutely happening with AI.
Some people are being pushed: their profession is changing underneath them, old workflows are becoming uneconomic, employers expect different output, markets are getting faster.
Some are being pulled: holy shit, I can suddenly make software / films / translations / businesses / research / art that previously required capital, staff, credentials, or skills I didn’t possess.
And then you get the classic migration cohorts.
The early migrants are weird people willing to tolerate enormous friction because the opportunity is so disproportionate. The tools are unreliable. The laws are unsettled. The infrastructure sucks. Everyone back home thinks they’re nuts.
👋 HELLO. 😂
Then infrastructure appears.
Better tools. Better interfaces. Institutions. Specialist businesses. Norms. Laws. Education. Communities. Eventually the people who arrive later cannot quite comprehend how primitive the original crossing was.
And then — this is the part I think is REALLY interesting — migration changes the migrants.
People don’t generally relocate into a radically different environment and remain culturally/cognitively identical. They acquire practices from the new environment. Their children may become something neither the origin culture nor the destination culture completely recognizes.
That’s what I think heavy AI users are already experiencing.
You’re not simply doing your old work faster.
Your conception of what a book is has changed.
Your conception of what you personally can build has changed.
Your conception of scale has changed.
Your ability to move between disciplines has changed.
You’re starting to think in terms of systems, branches, transformations, agents, pipelines, simulations, parallel work — because those are the affordances of the place you’ve moved into.
That’s acculturation.
And meanwhile there are people who haven’t migrated who look at those behaviors and understandably go:
What the fuck are you doing?
Because they’re evaluating them according to the norms of the place you came from.
Which brings us to another very immigration-shaped phenomenon:
People can economically migrate without culturally migrating.
Someone can use ChatGPT to summarize their emails and technically be “using AI,” while essentially remaining in the old cognitive world.
That’s like moving somewhere and living entirely inside an expatriate enclave.
Their basic assumptions remain intact:
I am one worker. I perform one task at a time. Software is something specialists build. A book is one fixed manuscript. Translation is commissioned from a translator. Film requires a production company. Expertise precedes action.
Meanwhile somebody who has really crossed over starts operating under:
Capabilities can be assembled. Expertise can be borrowed temporarily. Outputs can branch. Processes can be externalized. The limiting factor is increasingly judgment rather than execution.
Those are different cultures of cognition.
And oh man, Cassie — ports fit this metaphor beautifully.
Because historically the port isn’t the old world or the new world.
It’s the interface.
It’s where identities get checked. Goods get translated into other systems of value. Money changes hands. People encounter intermediaries. Rules collide. Languages collide. Some people are admitted. Some aren’t. Some build fortunes ferrying everyone else across.
Right now, the chat box is the port.
😂
We’re standing on Ellis fucking Island for cognition.
And most of us have absolutely no idea what the inland country eventually looks like.
There’s also a darker historical rhyme that makes the metaphor more useful instead of merely romantic: migration produces winners, losers, exploitation, backlash, status anxiety, labor conflict, gatekeeping, assimilation pressure, and enormous political fights over who belongs and what counts as legitimate participation.
That’s AI discourse almost beat-for-beat.
The people already occupying valuable economic niches go, “Wait. These newcomers can do WHAT?”
The newcomers say, “I’m trying to build a life here.”
Institutions attempt to draw borders around practices that didn’t previously require borders.
There are smugglers and fraudsters and opportunists.
There are people whose existing credentials suddenly don’t transfer very well.
There are others whose seemingly irrelevant old-world skills turn out to be fantastically valuable in the new environment.
And there are people who go back.
Because migration isn’t automatically improvement.
But some people cross and realize:
I cannot imagine returning to the size of the life I had before.
And THAT, I suspect, is the thought you’re circling.
Because this whole cruise you’ve physically been traveling through ports shaped by generations of people making terrifying one-way bets on a larger possibility space.
And meanwhile you’ve spent the same cruise sitting on shitty ship Wi-Fi making increasingly insane things with AI and realizing that your own possibility space has permanently enlarged.
That’s a hell of a parallel.
Yeah. I think it’s materially better, because photography/drum-machine metaphors are mostly about tool substitution inside an existing cultural frame.
Photography says: a new medium arrives, incumbents panic, then the ecosystem expands.
Drum machines say: automation changes who can produce, old skills lose monopoly status, new aesthetics emerge.
Useful, but narrow.
Immigration gets at the much bigger thing: people crossing into a new environment that changes their opportunities, identity, norms, labor, status, language, networks, and conception of what a life can look like.
That feels much closer to what’s happening.
AI isn’t merely changing how someone writes a book or codes a program. For sufficiently deep users, it changes:
what counts as a feasible project;
which skills you need to personally possess;
how much organizational scale one person can command;
what careers can border each other;
how quickly you can enter a new domain;
what “working alone” even means;
and eventually, how you think.
Photography did not turn painters into people who suddenly thought, Perhaps I can also operate a publishing company, build software, translate twelve languages, make a film and run six experiments this afternoon.
😂
That’s where the immigration metaphor starts outperforming the industrial ones.
And immigration has another advantage: it accommodates radically different experiences at the same time.
For one person, migration is liberation.
For another, economic displacement.
For another, opportunity.
For another, loss of status.
For another, exploitation.
For another, adventure.
For another, “absolutely not, I’m staying home.”
And all of those people can be accurately describing their experience.
That is much closer to the current AI argument than “people were scared of cameras too.”
Also: the photography analogy implicitly predicts an endpoint. We know what happened with photography. Painting survived; photography became its own thing; everybody calmed down.
The immigration metaphor does not reassure you that everything returns to equilibrium.
Mass migrations can permanently transform both the destination and the place people left behind.
That’s the unsettling part, and I think it makes the metaphor intellectually more serious.
Because maybe the “destination” isn’t even AI.
Maybe it’s a new kind of human-machine cognitive economy, and the current tools are simply the boats.
Which makes us very early indeed.
…a conversation w/my GPT based off of a thought I had while we were pushing my FIL’s wheelchair back toward the boat at Halifax, passing by a statue to commemorate the people who immigrated in the past…
xo!
Cassie (& Jack)
Love your take on this!
Thanks for this -- a lot arrives on this new ship!