Imagine the frog is in the pot. It will panic and jump out if you have the water boiling hot.
Instead..start out the water as extremely cold or lukewarm..then gradually just turn up the temperature, little by little.
Until the frogs forget they’re frogs.
The frog is you, the frog is me.
The pot of water is technological culture & its impacts we deal with.
Origins of Mass Smartness
Before we dive in, we need to do some history briefing:
Autocorrect was first introduced to the masses by Tegic Communications as T9, for the numeric pads on all those brick/dinosaur/Nokia/indestructible phones back in 1995.
June 27, 2007 was another important date: Steve Jobs unveiled the very first smart Apple phone, the iPhone (I emphasize this because some may not know that Apple introduced a music phone prior).
We’ve come a long long way since these times (currently 2025):
30 years since T9.
18 years since the iPhone genesis.
T9 → dumb phones → smart-ish phones → iPhone → smartness snowball begins
Snowballs: Technologies are amortized and build upon other technologies, they are concepts, theories, physics, amalgamations that catch fire to manifest something as an alteration of what is, or sometimes something new entirely.
After all, without the snowball of the caveman holding a a burning stick that was naturally created in the grasslands, you wouldn’t be able to set fire to the electronic horse.
2007 was the ushering of the smart era, the era that we originally were happy to be living through, but sadly maybe today’s sentiments aren’t quite the same.
The snowball has gotten to melting temperatures.
AutoThink 🏎️💭
Autocorrect was a mere gateway into what we are experiencing now. Autocorrect based on the user experience being expressed through the modality of the original “dumb” phones, with a T9 numerical pad, was so that when we pressed a specific key so many times, we had someone or something watching our back and helping us get less carpal tunnel (that didn’t help clearly).
Lately now that we are past these days when we used to think of autocorrect as a little helper, now its more so,
F*cking → Ducking
Sh*t → Ship
I know you’ve been annoyed by this, be honest 😉
We've definitely transcended these simple misspellings though, into more so our thinking has been set to some foundational modal doing a lot of our inference, processing, and logic for us.
“We’ve outsourced our ability as humans to these statistical compute machines”
You’re probably thinking at least one of following:
Well duh, no sh*t Sherlock!
What are we gonna do about it? its here to stay
But its really convenient!
Well …People are lazy 🤷♂️
Hard Truth ䷼🧱
The reality of this mess is that we’ve always outsourced our abilities to technology.
The fire, the wheel, the horse, the cotton gin, the airplane, the [insert anything that has provided advancement, leisure, speed, efficiency], have progressed our civilization. Often these amortizations / snowballs have all led to us getting accustomed to this outsourcing.
We got used to the corrections of the T9 on our original mobile phones being the thing watching our backs, and now we have billion token statistical models watching our back so that we can make sure we don’t make any typos in the risky text we’re sending to someone before we indefinitely ghost them on a Friday night.
Autocorrect was a drip of leisure dopamine.
We’ve graduated to being one-shotted by statistical ayahuasca.
I don’t mean to say LLMs are bad, the world is on fire, the government is spying on us.
I mean to say, whether you like it or not, technologies pervade our existence.
We've let technology creep into many other aspects of our lives. It's good to consciously keep a check on these aspects because soon, a lot of us end up being on auto-pilot.
send a reminder text → order door dash/uber eats → have [ChatGPT, grok, claude, deepseek] draft a school essay outline → actually just do the whole essay → vent to an LLM as my therapist (and it reaffirm whatever I say)→ have the LLM plan out my vacation → have the LLM give me advice on life → have the LLM give me advice on how to propose to my S/O → have the LLM give me tips on handling a tricky family situation → have the LLM live my life.
We soon forget many tasks that we used to do manually, the aspects that we just had to annoyingly regurgitate.
But maybe it’s in these things that make us human…the repetitive, boring, and mundane imperfections that remind us that we’re not made to be machines.
Typos dont zeem lik sutch a big deel after al.
