"There is no shortage of writing about artificial intelligence. Most of it sits at the two poles of collective imagination: radiant optimism or cinematic dread. Depending on who speaks, AI is either the torch that will illuminate a golden future or the spark that burns the house down. What it rarely is-despite all the noise-is real. Realism is unfashionable. It lacks spectacle."
"I find that not being a technologist helps. To understand the ripple effects of AI, one does not need to engineer it-one only needs to observe what societies do with their tools. Each technological leap has rewritten human behavior before it transformed the tool itself. Take social media; long before platforms engineered infinite scroll or algorithmic feeds, human behavior had already shifted toward curation and compulsive checking. The tool eventually evolved to optimize for these behaviors."
AI discourse polarizes between radiant optimism and cinematic dread, leaving realism scarce. Media and market incentives favor spectacle and exponential narratives, pushing rhetoric toward apocalyptic or ecstatic extremes to justify valuations and capture attention through fear and faith. Technological change often follows shifts in human behavior rather than preceding them: social media demonstrates curation and compulsive checking emerging before platform optimization. Designers occupy the intersection of technology and human behavior and must translate technical possibility into livable interactions. Anticipating and shaping how people adopt and use AI will be as important as building the underlying systems.
Read at Peter Adam Boeckel
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]