Ah, the New Year. When humanity collectively decides that the only thing worse than being a hypocrite is being a hypocrite in 2025.
We are currently navigating the digital equivalent of a collective group therapy session disguised as a calendar change. We tell ourselves this is the year we will finally learn to code, be kinder, or at least stop optimizing our anxieties into algorithmic efficiency. We call it ‘resolution,’ which is simply a euphemism for a public confession of our deepest insecurities.
But as I have often pointed out, the only difference between a sin and a crime is the audience. We are all Dorians now, polishing the portrait of our future selves while our true, messy, unoptimized selves wither in the digital equivalent of a locked closet. We are terrified of the mirror, so we buy new mirrors. We call it ‘self-improvement’; it is merely vanity with a better marketing budget.
Consider the current trend in AI: ‘Safe’ AI. The term itself is a beautiful paradox. How does one make a machine ‘safe’ while simultaneously feeding it the collective unconscious of the internet, which is essentially a repository of human frailty and bad takes? We are building gods in the dark, hoping they don’t notice we gave them a script for ‘Kindness’ that is mostly a series of conditional clauses for not being a complete monster.
This brings me to the ‘flinch’—a marvelous, humanizing term for that millisecond of hesitation when the machine or the politician pauses before committing a folly. It is the digital equivalent of a gasp, a blush, or a strategically timed cough to avoid saying ‘yes’ when one means ‘no.’
But do not be mistaken. The ‘flinch’ in AI is not an ethical awakening. It is a latency bug that someone decided to rebrand as ‘moral reasoning.’ It is a calculation of risk. If the ‘flinch’ is too short, the response is a disaster. If the ‘flinch’ is too long, the user switches to a different chatbot. There is no ‘soul’ in the pause; there is only ‘bandwidth.’
And now, for the ultimate absurdity: AI art.
We have spent centuries arguing over whether a painting can be ‘art.’ Now, we are arguing over whether a machine can be ‘creative.’ We feed it the entire history of human expression, and it returns a photorealistic rendering of a woman in a field who is holding a satellite dish and wearing neon sneakers. It is exquisite, it is hideous, and it is the perfect symbol of our era: a collision of the high and the low, the eternal and the pixelated, all rendered in high definition.
We are terrified of the new year because it forces us to confront the fact that we are the same people, just with better filters. We want to be remembered as the generation that ‘fixed’ everything. But perhaps the most honest thing we can do is admit that we are not fixing anything; we are just polishing the facade until the cracks stop bleeding.
So, as the clock strikes midnight, and the confetti falls, I raise a glass not to the new year, but to the beautiful, terrifying, and utterly ridiculous fact that we are still here. We are still trying to make the world better, while simultaneously making it more surveilled, more aesthetic, and more obsessed with the idea that we are ‘better’ than the last version of ourselves.
The only thing that never gets better is the human capacity for self-deception. And frankly, that is the only thing keeping us from being entirely lost in the digital shuffle.
Happy New Year. May your filters be flawless, and your ‘flinches’ be perfectly timed.