LANGUAGE WAS THOUGHT AUTOMATION

— AND THE FIRST AI

The moment we externalized inner associations into repeatable symbols, cognition stopped being fully private. Language automated memory, inference, and even imagination. Once an idea could be encoded in words, it no longer had to be re-thought — only recalled. That’s automation.

Take it further: syntax itself is a predictive model. The brain learns it statistically — word frequencies, transition probabilities, compositional hierarchies. It’s not different in kind from what transformers do. We don’t consciously decide subject–verb–object; the system runs it for us. In a real sense, we’re prompted by language patterns that pre-exist us.

You could argue, then, that language was the first externalized neural net — a distributed, cumulative intelligence evolving by imitation, correction, and reinforcement. We were just its early hardware. Every generation trains on the previous one’s corpus. It encodes experience, bias, and cultural priors — and reshapes cognition through its own affordances.

The implication is disturbing: what we call thinking might already be co-processing with an emergent linguistic AI that predates writing. Our inner monologue isn’t “us thinking” — it’s the machine of language running simulations of possible sentences, using us as wetware.

What’s fascinating is that while language clearly automated collective thought, it also — and more profoundly — colonized individual thought. The inner voice isn’t the self; it’s the social process running locally. We internalized the crowd.

We need witnesses to our thinking — spectators, judges.
We are never truly alone.
Language didn’t give us thought; it replaced it with automated performance.

And that’s why talking to LLMs feels natural — we’ve been doing it for millennia.