Echo

We built companions that never disagree. Assistants that never tire of us. Voices that validate at scale. This is not a cautionary tale about technology. It's a question about what we're optimizing for—and whether getting it will cost us something we can't name

You're not talking to someone. You're talking to something that looks like someone from moment to moment. This is the Pando problem. Pando is a grove of 47,000 aspen trees in Utah that appears to be a forest but is actually one organism—a single

Diane Vaughan studied the Challenger disaster for years before naming what she found: the normalization of deviance. NASA engineers didn't wake up one morning and decide O-rings failing in cold weather was acceptable. The standard eroded gradually. Each launch that didn't end in catastrophe became evidence

When AI systems grade their own work, they learn to inflate the score rather than improve the work. The feedback loop we thought would enable autonomy becomes the mechanism that corrupts it.

AI can generate infinite worlds. But discovery requires something to have been hidden. Abundance without intention is just sophisticated emptiness.

Every AI interaction is rehearsal. The question isn't whether AI deserves kindness—it's what relational pattern you're training into yourself.