You’ve heard how to boil a frog, right?
You don’t drop it into hot water. You place it in cool water and turn the heat up one degree at a time.
Turns out, that isn’t true. Frogs are smarter than that. The jury is still out on us humans.
Nobody gets radicalized in an afternoon.
Social media was supposed to connect us to a world that was larger than our own. Expose us to new ideas and cultures. Connect us to new and distant friends. And sometimes it does.
But, more often than not, it makes our world smaller.
We watch a harmless video that we find interesting, surprising, or even enraging. Then the algorithm shows us another, and another, and another.
The more we watch, the more extreme or entrenched the ideas become. We didn’t start with those more extreme ideas or positions. They were formed… one post at a time.
I wonder if it’s happening again with AI.
Here comes this wonderful technology that feels like a superpower. We’re faster and able to do things we’ve not been able to do before.
So we give it more of ourselves in order to amplify ourselves.
A decision here, a sentence there, a judgment we used to make ourselves. It’s not everything. It’s just this one thing, and another, and another.
Give enough of ourselves to the machine and one day it’s hard to tell where the machine ends and we begin.
It feels like it might be getting hot in here.