Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ NASA and Shovels
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ NASA and Shovels
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ in 2020 - proud of my ‘Drafts Inbox; having only 6 entries. - compare and contrast to 259 as of this morning.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Biggest surprise here is that it is still marked 🚧 - so I guess I need to finish it off!
The internet was supposed to celebrate differences. Instead, it’s weaponised conformity. We’ve narrowed acceptable discourse to a narrow band. A band where ±1 standard deviation seems to be too wide and anything outside the ‘consensus’ gets you piled on. (Consensus with a very loud and increasingly violent minority.) The phrase vive la différence is nearly extinct in modern English, and it shows. We are not ignorant of diversity - we’re terrified of it. So we hide the messy, interesting parts of ourselves and perform an acceptable vanilla version for the town square.
The result? A society suffocating under its own self-censorship. The crowd isn’t forcing us to conform - we’re doing it preemptively, trading authenticity for safety. We’ve accepted the bargain that you’re either with us or against us, and nobody wants to find out what happens if you dare explore the edges.
The road less taken isn’t less travelled anymore; it’s invisible.
This prompted on reading Om this morning: Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World, but it isn’t a new theme of mine … or indeed others …
🖇️ What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other
Quoting the quote:
I’ve been thinking about how quickly we’ve adapted to working with AI. We all understand the deal. If the output is bad, it’s probably on us. The prompt was vague. The context was missing. We didn’t give it enough constraints. So we revise. We clarify. We try again. No frustration. No judgment. Just iteration.
I know right? … and then the clincher
What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other. Somewhere along the way, we learned to treat machines as systems that need better inputs–but we still treat humans as if they should just know. And when they don’t, we judge competence, take it personally, make assumptions, or shut down.
Guilty. NO argument. Going to try harder.
The link above also references:
But better to read 🔗 UXtopian
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Bit by bit we are being divided and ‘taken out’. That was 2022.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ 2019 - national gun awareness day.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ This was two years ago … nothing has changed
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Reflecting on the pillow guy back in 2022 - and thinking also how easily it all went away.
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Retro.