Design X AI - 04

APATHY

So if AI and the trajectory of our future is so dismal, how is it that day-to-day feels normal? Or, why is nobody freaking out about this? Well, for a few reasons.

With technology in particular, we have come to expect rapid iteration, updates, and releases. Compare a site like Instagram in 2016 to what it is today side-by-side and you might not even call them the same thing. The rapid, incremental changes are baked into our understanding of technology and the digital-age itself. 

At a societal and individual level, one reason is learned helplessness. This is a condition in which a person has a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. After repeated efforts and voicing of concern and outrage have not led to the changes one would like to see happen, a person may come to believe that their actions have no power to change the outcome of an event or the future. 

Another reason is known as Crisis Fatigue. This experience is so ubiquitous it hardly needs further explanation. But there are several global, geopolitical, natural, and social crises going on right now, each one of these issues is almost incomprehensibly horrific. How am I to make progress against atrocities when I can’t even keep up with how many there are? It takes effort and mindfulness just to keep from becoming desensitized. 

Both of these reasons pair with the “boiling frog syndrome”. The age-old concept here is that if you put a frog into a pot of water and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will never jump out because the change is too gradual, so it ends up boiling alive. In reality, the frog will jump out of the water, but the point stands; as our inequality and injustice gradually increases in our increasingly absurd reality, it becomes impossible to know when the moment arises for us to take a single collective action against it all. 

To extend the metaphor, we are not just the frog floating in warm water waiting for death. The frog has tried again and again to leap from the pot only to have the walls raised higher and be swatted back down. The pot is now 3 feet deep, the walls are greased, the frog is beaten to exhaustion, and most of the water is already boiling. If you feel that the water around you is not yet boiling, consider this the privilege and opportunity to take action and help others.

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DESIGN X AI is an 8 part blog series written 100% by my fallible human brain. I’m a designer, not an AI expert.