Opinion: Moving fast, breaking the world. AI risks shattering our shared reality.
Briefly

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."
"The Creature begins gentle and curious, longing for connection. Only after rejection and isolation does he turn violent. Shelley forces the harder question: who is the true monster - the being who lashes out in misery, or the creator who refuses responsibility?"
Artificial intelligence now writes, generates images, and shapes information consumed by billions globally. This technological acceleration outpaces moral wisdom, echoing patterns from previous communication revolutions. The historian Yuval Harari identifies AI as the first technology capable of independently generating narratives, fundamentally different from previous innovations that merely spread or amplified existing stories. This represents a transfer of power over perception itself. The parallel to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is instructive: Victor's crime was not creation but abandonment and refusal of responsibility. The Creature became violent only after rejection and isolation. Similarly, creators of powerful technologies must maintain enduring duty and establish safeguards rather than pursuing speed without accountability.
Read at The Mercury News
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