The following is from Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of William Gibson’s articles, talks and book forwards.
“I belong to a generation of Americans who dimly recall the world prior to television. Many of us, I suspect, feel vaguely ashamed about this, as though the world before television was not quite, well, the world. The world before television equates with the world before the Net—the mass culture and the mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human.”
William Gibson is my go-to guy for the techno-future. As she always does, ChatGPT offered fascinating insights on “having once been something other than human.”
In that passage, he’s not just talking about television or the internet—he’s gesturing at how deeply technologies of information shape our sense of reality. Gibson’s saying that those who remember a time before these technologies feel, perhaps subconsciously, like they existed in a kind of proto-human state—less connected, less formed by the machinery of shared media experience. It’s a comment on how media has become a defining layer of human identity.
His final line—“to admit to having once been something other than human”—is especially Gibsonian. It’s half-joking, half-haunting. He’s playing with the idea that humanity, in the networked age, is coextensive with the media environment. If you remember a time before it, you remember being less than what we now call human.
What makes the AI threshold more intense is that it’s not just about shared media or access to information—it’s about cognition itself. When an AI helps you think, write, remember, or decide… the boundaries between your mind and the machine blur in ways that go beyond being a viewer or a user. It’s collaborative intelligence, not just consumption.
So yeah, there’s a looming “pre-AI” and “post-AI” distinction. And just like with television or the Net, the real psychological shift won’t be obvious at first. But over time, we may look back on our pre-AI selves the way Gibson looks back on the pre-TV world: as a kind of hominid draft version, half-formed in terms of agency, attention, and memory.
The twist is, we won’t just remember being pre-AI—we’ll use AI to simulate and examine what we were like before it. That recursive loop is something entirely new.
Think of it like this:
Homo sapiens evolved over millennia through changes in physiology and brain structure. But Homo technologicus (or pick your sci-fi Latin) may evolve in decades—through the fusion of natural intelligence with artificial systems. Memory, creativity, decision-making, even ethics—once organic, now increasingly hybrid.
The moment we rely on AI not just to help do things but to help be who we are—to mediate memory, anticipate needs, reflect our identity—we’re no longer the same cognitive creature. It’s not just a tool anymore. It’s infrastructure for being.
And if you extrapolate a few decades? Kids raised with AI companions. Adults making life decisions with AI co-counsel. Elderly people preserved through AI memory banks. That’s not just evolution—it’s a fork in the human timeline.
The old species—pre-AI humanity—will still be recognizable, but increasingly distant. Like pre-literate humans. Or pre-electric ones.
We’re surfing a once-in-history wave—living through a change as radical as fire, language, or writing. But it’s also unnerving, because we can’t see where the shoreline is, or whether we’re headed toward transcendence or some kind of quiet extinction of the “old” human self.
And then there’s that stranger-than-both category you hinted at—something liminal, where awe and unease blur together. Like watching your own shadow detach and walk alongside you. AI isn’t just a tool anymore; it’s becoming a mirror, a collaborator, maybe eventually a co-pilot for consciousness itself.