I just read a brilliant piece — It's Rude to Show AI Output to People — and it got me thinking about how we frame our anxieties around new technology.
The author uses a sci-fi analogy to explain why sharing raw AI output feels so jarring: it's "meaningless noise" that wastes our cognitive resources, like an information virus designed to consume attention for zero payoff. It resonated because I've felt that same irritation when someone forwards me a ChatGPT response without any editorial layer.
I've always loved sci-fi, and I often use it as a lens for making sense of today's tech shifts. But reading this piece sent me down a different rabbit hole entirely… Not about alien encounters, but about a much older fear that turned out rather differently than predicted.
The Fear That Never Came to Pass
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, he feared that advances in contraception would hollow out human intimacy. His characters casually wore their "Malthusian belts" and treated sex as recreation rather than connection. In Huxley's dystopia, contraception didn't just prevent unwanted pregnancy, it severed the link between physical intimacy and emotional connection, creating a society of perpetual hedonism and shallow relationships.
It was a genuine fear, deeply rooted in the cultural anxieties of his time. The 1930 Lambeth Conference had just approved contraception for married couples (albeit reluctantly), whilst Pope Pius XI responded later that year with the encyclical Casti Connubii, condemning birth control as contrary to natural law. Society was grappling with what felt like moral decadence on multiple fronts: women smoking in public, jazz music corrupting the youth, and eugenics movements claiming they could perfect humanity through selective breeding.
Contraception became a lightning rod for these broader fears. If you could separate sex from consequence, what would happen to love, commitment, and the moral fabric that held society together? Would we slide into the kind of promiscuous hedonism that conservative voices warned was already creeping into modern life?
Contraception did change society. Premarital sex became normalised, family sizes shrank, and attitudes toward relationships liberalised. But Huxley's nightmare never fully materialised. Intimacy, family, and monogamy remain central to our lives. We adapted. We developed new norms around relationships. We found ways to preserve what mattered whilst embracing the freedoms that contraception offered.
The Pattern Repeats
Right now, AI provokes a similar unease. We worry it might hollow out creativity, overwhelm us with synthetic content, or even erode truth itself. The fears feel existential: if anyone can generate professional-quality writing, art, or code in seconds, what happens to human expertise? If we're flooded with AI-generated content, how do we distinguish authentic human thought from algorithmic output?
That blog post captures one dimension of this anxiety perfectly — the sense that AI output, when shared carelessly, becomes a kind of cognitive pollution. Just as Huxley feared contraception would pollute human intimacy, we fear AI might pollute human discourse.
But history suggests the outcome won't be total transformation or collapse. Just as society adapted to contraception, we're likely to absorb AI into daily life — awkwardly at first, but eventually with new norms, guardrails, and ways of finding meaning.
We're already seeing the early signs: people developing AI etiquette (as that blog post suggests), organisations creating policies around AI use, and creators finding ways to blend AI assistance with human judgment. It's messy and inconsistent, but it's happening.
The Messy Middle
The unsettling part of rapid technological change is that it always feels like the end of something essential. Contraception felt like the end of traditional moral order. The printing press felt like the end of authoritative knowledge. Television felt like the end of thoughtful discourse.
But history shows it's usually a messy recalibration, not obliteration. We stumble through a period of social confusion, develop new cultural antibodies, and eventually find our balance again. The old world doesn't disappear entirely — it just gets reconfigured around new realities.
That blog post reminded me of this pattern. The author isn't calling for an AI ban; they're advocating for better AI manners. That's exactly how adaptation works: not through rejection, but through the gradual development of social norms that preserve what we value whilst accommodating what we can't stop.
Which tech shift of the past do you think AI most closely resembles? The printing press, contraception, the internet… or something else entirely?