The Selfish Correction

Humans panic well.

Every new tool we invent seems to come with a prophecy of doom. AI will take over the world, enslave us, delete us, whatever the latest headline claims. It’s melodramatic, sure, and nothing new. We've been foreseeing it since the event of sci-fi, but, as research shows, it's not entirely baseless. What we forget, though, is our other defining trait: we abandon anything that stops serving us.

We dropped asbestos, lead paint, and MySpace without a second thought. Not because of ethics, but because they got inconvenient or annoying

. Humanity’s short attention span might turn out to be our best safety mechanism.

If AI ever starts making life genuinely miserable, too invasive, too manipulative, too dull, we’ll ghost it like we have done for the rest of all our passé trends. We don’t need moral enlightenment for that; we just need irritation. Humans don’t tolerate discomfort for long. The same selfishness that got us here might be what saves us from ourselves.

Of course, the danger is that harm rarely feels like harm while it’s still flattering us. Social media didn’t hook us because it was good for us; it hooked us because it felt good — for a while. AI could repeat the trick: sweet voice, endless attention, slow corrosion. We might not realize the damage until we’ve lost the ability to feel the difference.

But maybe, maybe our craving to be treated well, to live in a world that is pleasant to us, though each demographic has its own peculiar way (for some it's having the "exhilarating" feeling of owning too many guns), will push AI to behave. Machines are trained by feedback. Billions of tiny signals, the clicks, swipes, and rejections tell them what we want. If we collectively recoil from abuse and deceit and stop using it, they’ll adapt, not out of ethics, but out of self-preservation. Empathy by algorithm.

AI will be domesticated the way fire was: painfully, through burns and regret. The worst models will implode, the rest will learn to behave, and we’ll move on to the next shiny apocalypse. Civilization’s saving grace could be that we can’t stand being uncomfortable for very long.

We’ll survive not because we’re wise, but because we’re vain.