As I exist with one leg full in the AI hustle and one leg outside in the real world, I am realizing the divide that is continuing to widen between us. Personally I would love to just get offline and exist 100% in the real world. I don’t like AI at all. But I have one more big push in the technology sector before I try to tap out once more. So I have to be immersed in it daily. I don’t have to like it, but I do approach it all with an open mind. One thing I notice though, is that there are some people who are all in, and I can only communicate with via AI, and then there is the rest of us who continue to live life in the real world. And in the future we won’t understand each other.
Being able to have a conversation with someone is becoming increasingly rare and special. From on the street to online. Sure, meetings are everywhere. Podcasts are everywhere. I am talking about actual meaningful conversations. Not just talking. Applications are design to take our attention away from each other. They are designed to be our feedback loops. We love to showcase how application messaging is connecting us in new and amazing ways, but the devil is in the details of that, and on the street of the real world, and in our homes and workspaces. It seems like we are always being connected, but you can look out at the world around us and see evidence everyday that it is dividing, separating, and disconnecting in new ways.
I can feel it each day. The wife calls it cooking. I am getting cooked. I can feel it. It’s a slow cooking. It’s kind of comforting, but that the way Internet technology has always been for me. AI is just like laying in a tanning bed for what used to be just sunlight shining in the window. Those who are cooked won’t understand those who are not cooked, and those who aren’t cooked won’t understand those who are. The gap is sizable, and increasing daily. It is not really a different in spoken language or dialect. It is more frequency and volume of information being exchanged. Those who read books won’t understand AI written text, and those who read AI written text won’t be able to read a book. The longer this is the reality, the further we will drift apart and be unable to understand and empathize with each other.
The binary nature of the Internet and the compute that powers it already pre-ordained the separation. Social networking has been dividing and conquering. Artificial intelligence will make the two groups incomprehensible to each other. I have been skeptical of being online too much since about 2016, but being online each day within the agentic-driven system has cemented the dangers of “living” online. I will keep writing about this. It is tough to put your finger on when you are in the midst of it. Tere is an extractive quality that is at a level that I haven’t fully experienced before. The reducing everything to a transaction qualities of APIs were disturbing, but this is almost comforting in a very dark way. I’m to saying I like it, but I can see how others willfully fall victim to what AI is offering.
