Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now
AI represents the greatest cognitive offloading in the history of humanity. We once offloaded memory to writing, arithmetic to calculators and navigation to GPS. Now we are beginning to offload judgment, synthesis and even meaning-making to systems that speak our language, learn our habits and tailor our truths.
AI systems are growing increasingly adept at recognizing our preferences, our biases, even our peccadillos. Like attentive servants in one instance or subtle manipulators in another, they tailor their responses to please, to persuade, to assist or simply to hold our attention.
While the immediate effects may seem benign, in this quiet and invisible tuning lies a profound shift: The version of reality each of us receives becomes progressively more uniquely tailored. Through this process, over time, each person becomes increasingly their own island. This divergence could threaten the coherence and stability of society itself, eroding our ability to agree on basic facts or navigate shared challenges.
AI personalization does not merely serve our needs; it begins to reshape them. The result of this reshaping is a kind of epistemic drift. Each person starts to move, inch by inch, away from the common ground of shared knowledge, shared stories and shared facts, and further into their own reality.
The AI Impact Series Returns to San Francisco - August 5 The next phase of AI is here - are you ready? Join leaders from Block, GSK, and SAP for an exclusive look at how autonomous agents are reshaping enterprise workflows - from real-time decision-making to end-to-end automation. Secure your spot now - space is limited: https://bit.ly/3GuuPLF
This is not simply a matter of different news feeds. It is the slow divergence of moral, political and interpersonal realities. In this way, we may be witnessing the unweaving of collective understanding. It is an unintended consequence, yet deeply significant precisely because it is unforeseen. But this fragmentation, while now accelerated by AI, began long before algorithms shaped our feeds.
The unweaving
This unweaving did not begin with AI. As David Brooks reflected in The Atlantic, drawing on the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our society has been drifting away from shared moral and epistemic frameworks for centuries. Since the Enlightenment, we have gradually replaced inherited roles, communal narratives and shared ethical traditions with individual autonomy and personal preference.
What began as liberation from imposed belief systems has, over time, eroded the very structures that once tethered us to common purpose and personal meaning. AI did not create this fragmentation. But it is giving new form and speed to it, customizing not only what we see but how we interpret and believe.
... continue reading