What is the true risk of AI?

In this essay, I look beyond tech-industry rhetoric and PR narratives to try to answer that question. I examine how cultural memory, algorithmic systems, and power converge to keep us trapped in our past.

AI is not just a technological leap; it is a new regime of memory. One that archives, predicts, and resurrects our history with unprecedented ease.

This piece explores how AI shapes identity, suppresses novelty, and threatens our ability to imagine futures that are not mere extensions of what has already been.

The Blindness of the Present

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Humans interpret novelty through familiar categories.

We perceive new technologies through the lens of old ones, and reanimate past metaphors to explain new realities.

When a new medium emerges we often see it not for what it is, but for what it reminds us of. The internet, for example, was viewed as a new “library” or “newspaper” as opposed to the vast organism it proved to be.

McLuhan dubbed this the rear-view mirror effect, and its implication is that the future often arrives disguised as the past.

Because we face backward, we are often blinded by an inventions’s deeper transformations. We notice its effect only after it has already reshaped us, and we miss the true implication of change.

This results in what McLuhan called “media blindness.” We can see the past clearly, but we’re numb to the environment we’re actually living in. And that numbness leaves us blind to the true risk of new technologies.

The Dullness of Modern Power

As an engineer, I was hesitant to write about this. Silicon valley power operates through infrastructure and systems that are visually dull and narrative resistant. Server farms, algorithmic engines, and bureaucratic management lack drama and spectacle.

Technological power hides behind boredom – it evades scrutiny because it’s too dull to dramatize.

What is hard to narrativize is hard to resist. That is the very challenge of this essay. Boring systems that shape the world but defy drama enable power to hide in the mundane.

AI as we know it is only the latest layer of a much older project. For decades, businesses and governments relied on machine-learning systems that captured behavior, modeled identity, and treated the pas...

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