I really appreciated this post. It helped me name a kind of unease I’ve been carrying about where AI might be headed and how we process the strangeness along the way. The “smile curve” metaphor makes sense. It’s not just about technical progress or abstract risk; it’s about the emotional terrain too. That middle dip—the unease, the dissonance, the existential weirdness—feels real and worth acknowledging.
I often find myself balancing long-term hope with short-term concern. This piece didn’t resolve that tension, but it gave it shape.
Optimism, to me, doesn’t mean ignoring risk. It means staying with the complexity long enough to build something better. This post helped me do that, at least for a moment.
I like how you named the tension between long-term hope and short-term concern. That’s exactly part of the “emotional terrain” I was trying to capture with the smile curve. I like your framing that optimism isn’t smoothing away the middle dip, but sitting with it long enough to imagine better paths forward.
I wonder, the "dip” might feel different depending on how each of us approaches AI—whether as researchers, users, skeptics, or dreamers. For me, it sometimes shows up as unease, but at other times it feels like fertile ground for new ways of thinking. I look forward to hearing how others would describe that middle zone.
I really appreciated this post. It helped me name a kind of unease I’ve been carrying about where AI might be headed and how we process the strangeness along the way. The “smile curve” metaphor makes sense. It’s not just about technical progress or abstract risk; it’s about the emotional terrain too. That middle dip—the unease, the dissonance, the existential weirdness—feels real and worth acknowledging.
I often find myself balancing long-term hope with short-term concern. This piece didn’t resolve that tension, but it gave it shape.
Optimism, to me, doesn’t mean ignoring risk. It means staying with the complexity long enough to build something better. This post helped me do that, at least for a moment.
I like how you named the tension between long-term hope and short-term concern. That’s exactly part of the “emotional terrain” I was trying to capture with the smile curve. I like your framing that optimism isn’t smoothing away the middle dip, but sitting with it long enough to imagine better paths forward.
I wonder, the "dip” might feel different depending on how each of us approaches AI—whether as researchers, users, skeptics, or dreamers. For me, it sometimes shows up as unease, but at other times it feels like fertile ground for new ways of thinking. I look forward to hearing how others would describe that middle zone.