Opinion: Moving fast, breaking the world. AI risks shattering our shared reality.
Artificial intelligence is here: writing paragraphs, generating images, mimicking voices, shaping what billions of people see each day, whether it is true or not.
As I watch this era unfold, I feel something familiar — the uneasy sense that power is accelerating far faster than wisdom.
I felt it again watching filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-nominated retelling of Frankenstein. The film feels less like nostalgia than recognition. Certain stories return when civilization reaches a threshold. Mary Shelley wrote her novel at the dawn of the industrial age. It resurfaces whenever innovation outruns moral reflection.
We are there again.
I have lived through enough revolutions in communication to recognize the pattern. I remember city rooms where facts were checked because names were attached and reputations were at stake. Many of us believed the internet would deepen democracy. We did not foresee how quickly connection could mutate into division.
Today we stand at another hinge in history.
The historian Yuval Harari warns that AI is the first technology capable of generating narratives on its own. The printing press spread stories. Radio amplified them. The internet accelerated them. AI creates them manufacturing persuasion at machine speed and planetary scale.
This is not merely innovation. It is a transfer of power over perception itself.
In Frankenstein, Victor is not evil but intoxicated with possibility. He wants to be first. He succeeds.
And then he recoils.
Victor’s crime is not creation; it is abandonment. He builds no safeguards and assumes no enduring duty. He moves fast — and when something fragile breaks, he walks away.
The Creature begins gentle and curious, longing for connection. Only after rejection and isolation does he turn violent. Shelley forces the harder question: who is the true monster — the being who lashes out in misery, or the creator who refuses responsibility?
When Mark Zuckerberg championed “move fast and break things” at Facebook, speed became virtue and scale became triumph. If harm followed, it would be managed or deferred.
But what breaks in systems that shape perception is not code. It is trust.
Social media amplifies misinformation and erodes confidence in shared facts. Now that culture of acceleration is shaping AI. Synthetic voices enter elections. Fabricated images circulate during crises. Falsehood scales instantly; correction limps behind.
Victor’s tragedy was not that he created a life. It was that he refused stewardship.
Artificial intelligence is not a monster. It carries promise. It can accelerate medical discovery and expand knowledge. But democracy depends on shared reality. If AI fragments facts into billions of tailored narratives, truth becomes negotiable.
This is not simply a technological problem. It is a moral one.
The real horror in Frankenstein was a brilliant man who unleashed power and retreated from accountability.
If we build systems that reshape human thought and then hide behind quarterly earnings or passive scrolling, we will have repeated Victor’s mistake. We will not be standing in the laboratory. We will be living inside the world we rushed to create.
Machines can calculate. They can imitate. They can persuade. They cannot carry moral responsibility. That burden and privilege remain ours.
Tom Debley is a retired East Bay journalist and public affairs officer. He lives in Walnut Creek.