The dominant cultural conversation about AI is about future possibilities — replacing knowledge workers, designing drugs, ending democracy or saving it. Meanwhile, most people use machine-learning models hundreds of times a day without noticing. The photograph you took of your dog was constructed by a neural network. The spam folder you ignored sorted itself with…
A modern smartphone or laptop is running, at any given moment, dozens of background systems that the user has never thought about. The little padlock in the address bar. The squiggly word you type to prove you’re not a robot. The cookie that lets your shopping cart remember itself. The black-and-white square you point your…
A 2005 American home contained a small set of dedicated single-purpose electronics that everyone assumed would always be there. The compact camera in the bag. The iPod in the pocket. The pager clipped to the doctor’s belt. The Palm Pilot in the businessman’s briefcase. The Walkman in the gym bag. The Swiss quartz watch on…
If you could time-warp a curious adult from 1985 into a current American kitchen and let them watch a normal Tuesday evening unfold, the explanations they’d ask for would be specific. Why is everyone photographing their food? Why is your daughter recording a voice note instead of just calling her friend? Why is your husband…
Patience used to be involuntary. For most of human history, waiting wasn’t a virtue people cultivated so much as a condition they had no way to escape — the letter took a week to arrive, the show came on once a week, the meal took an hour to cook, and there was simply nothing to…
Mass-market adoption curves used to take decades. Television needed roughly 25 years to reach the typical American household. The telephone took about 35 years. The personal computer took about 15. Even the internet — often cited as the fast one — needed seven or eight years to reach 100 million users. In the last decade,…
When a technology arrives loudly, we notice the obvious things it replaces. Everyone knows the smartphone absorbed the camera, the music player, the paper map, and the alarm clock — those changes were visible, and we talked about them. But the deepest changes a technology makes are usually the quiet ones: the shifts in habit,…
In 1996, you used a calling card to ring overseas relatives, asked for directions at gas stations, and learned about strangers through their photos at Costco. The phone in your pocket — if you had one at all, which most people did not — could maybe make calls. The internet was a slow text affair…
A surprising amount of daily life has been quietly rewired within the last fifteen years. You summon a car from your phone, deposit a check by photographing it, pay for groceries by tapping your wrist, and call a relative in another country while watching them cook dinner, and none of these things existed in any…
Every previous information technology — writing, the printing press, the telegraph — produced a wave of contemporary panic about how it was rewiring human cognition. Most of those panics turned out to be overblown. The current panic about smartphones, social media, and AI may turn out the same way, or it may not. What’s clear…