Opinion: Moving fast, breaking the world. AI risks shattering our shared reality.
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Opinion: Moving fast, breaking the world. AI risks shattering our shared reality.
"The historian Yuval Harari warns that AI is the first technology capable of generating narratives on its own. The printing press spread stories. Radio amplified them. The internet accelerated them. AI creates them manufacturing persuasion at machine speed and planetary scale. This is not merely innovation. It is a transfer of power over perception itself."
"In Frankenstein, Victor is not evil but intoxicated with possibility. He wants to be first. He succeeds. And then he recoils. Victor's crime is not creation; it is abandonment. He builds no safeguards and assumes no enduring duty. He moves fast and when something fragile breaks, he walks away."
"Shelley forces the harder question: who is the true monster the being who lashes out in misery, or the creator who refuses responsibility? When Mark Zuckerberg championed move fast and break things at Facebook, speed became the priority over safeguards and accountability."
Artificial intelligence now generates text, images, and voices at scale, influencing billions daily. This acceleration of power without corresponding wisdom echoes patterns from previous technological revolutions. The Frankenstein narrative resurfaces during such thresholds, reflecting how innovation historically outpaces moral consideration. AI represents a fundamental shift: unlike previous technologies that spread or amplified existing stories, AI creates narratives autonomously at machine speed and planetary scale. This constitutes a transfer of power over perception itself. The core lesson from Shelley's novel is not about creation but abandonment—the creator's refusal to maintain responsibility for what they build. Similar patterns emerge in modern technology development, where speed prioritizes advancement over safeguards and accountability.
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