Author:
Nikolay D. Dmitriev
Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (St. Petersburg, Russia)
S. Y. Witte Institute for New Industrial Development (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Abstract:
The machine is already embedded in our everyday life: it intercepts attention at the point of entry, forms a response at the point of output, and lays a path precisely where the human being is only beginning to choose the direction of movement. The practical question has shifted – no longer “how accurate is the algorithm,” but in whose interests it is calibrated and whose needs it quietly elevates into a norm of life. This article examines AI as a point of historical bifurcation: one trajectory unfolds toward the nootransition – the liberation of the human being from routine labor for the sake of knowledge, creativity, and solidary creation – while the other encloses society within the loop of simulation rent, in the algorithmic production of desires before the want has had time to pass the test of reason. At the semantic core of our article lies cognitive symbiosis, by which we understand the coupling of human judgment, machine inference, and social meaning-making, capable of acting either as an amplifier of reason or as a mechanism of hidden dependence – as imperceptible as a finely calibrated regulator. Drawing on S. D. Bodrunov’s theory of noonomy, the present article interprets AI as a “test” of social maturity: whether society can withstand the trial of a culture of wants, preserve its industrial subjectivity, and prove capable of solidary, rather than rent-based, appropriation of the results of knowledge. The nootransition does not unfold by the inertia of progress – it requires the restructuring of institutions and, according to the theory of noonomy, a transformation in the very “quality of the human being”: one’s worldview, moral imperatives, and capacity to distinguish genuine need from simulacrum. Desimulation is not a rejection of abundance, but the restoration of meaning to abundance: the simulative either transforms into the genuine, withdraws before needs of a higher order, or loses the semiotic ballast invested in it by the industry of desires. Our analysis here is inseparable from a philosophy of measure. Different scholarly traditions converge on a single diagnosis: the machine is dangerous not by its power, but by its capture of the telos – the ultimate “for the sake of which” everything else is arranged. The conclusion is not consoling, but binding: AI acquires a creative status only where it is subordinated to the measure of reasonable want, verified and reproducible knowledge, technological sovereignty, and human dignity. Where this measure is lost, even the most powerful computing system remains mute – or, more destructively, quietly substitutes itself for judgment – and the human being mistakes the result for their own thought
Keywords: noonomy; nootransition; artificial intelligence; cognitive symbiosis; simulacrum of consumption; desimulation of wants; noosociety; nooproduction; solidarism; technological sovereignty; culture of wants
For citation: Dmitriev N.D. (2026). Cognitive Symbiosis at a Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence Between the Nootransition and Consumption Simulacra. Noonomy and Noosociety. Almanac of Scientific Works of the S. Y. Witte INID, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 52–75. DOI: 10.37930/2782-6465-2026-5-1-52-75