Discernible Differences

You open your eyes. Light streams through the cracks in your blinds, instantly letting you know it is daytime. You feel the cold air on your face and are compelled to stay in bed for a few more minutes. But you have work to do, and as you roll over to grab your phone, you hear a crunch. You move the blanket to find your glasses crushed underneath you. You forgot to put them on your nightstand the night before. You go to the bathroom, turn on the water, and let it heat up. A minute or two goes by, and suddenly you feel warm. You know the shower is ready.

After your morning routine, you sit down and start scrolling. You see some recent news about a frontier AI model that was just released, and a thread about a new biotech startup that released new data from their recent clinical trial. “Cool,” you think as you close your phone and sip your coffee, “more of the usual”. But in all honesty, your reaction is significantly underwhelming considering the gravity of the headlines you just read. Merriam-Webster defines a threshold as “the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced”.

Our physiological thresholds are well-studied, with methods to approximate their locations. For example, there is a luminance threshold that signals it is daytime, an audio threshold that indicates something has been broken, and a temperature threshold that indicates the shower has warmed up. In contrast, our psychological thresholds are not studied or quantified in this way, largely due to interindividual variability. For example, when you sat down to read the morning news, your reaction was that of acknowledgment, and nothing more. A different person may read those same headlines and have a much more adverse reaction.

You, however, have been staying well-informed with both the political and technological aspects of society. You knew the frontier model would be released, and had been following the biotech company for a while. These actions effectively shifted your baseline so that headlines that would read as a strong signal to some people read as a low signal or noise to you. Because you have observed and acknowledged the incremental differences over a long period, the net change is nearly indiscernible. Weber's Law states that the smallest detectable change in a stimulus is proportional to the magnitude of the original stimulus [1]:

$\frac{\Delta I}{I} = k$

where $\Delta I$ is the just-noticeable difference, $I$ is the baseline intensity, and $k$ is a constant.

Therefore, with repeated stimuli of increasing intensity, the detectable change in stimulus intensity is negligible compared to the net change. The best analogy I can draw is related to progress in the gym. Day to day, you do not appreciate the differences that occur (mostly because they are too small for you to discern); however, when comparing a picture of you now to a picture taken a year ago, the change screams right in your face. With the rate at which technological innovations occur, if you are up to date, each step is (relatively) negligible compared to the last.

Today’s headline seems like the logical next step from yesterday's. However, many people are ignorant of the incremental changes. Regretfully, the main source of news has become social media. It has been shown that people are clustered into ‘echochambers’ based on beliefs, interests, and subconscious tendencies. These echo chambers tend to dictate the content users consume. Many people have algorithms that feed them the latest in AI, biotech, and world news. This subset experiences the incremental changes. They appreciate the progress that is being made, but it has become their baseline.

They expect more content like what they have consumed, and thus, their detection threshold for jaw-dropping news has been significantly lowered. However, I have come to realize that this is a small subset of the population. Many people take no part in this echo chamber and are thus shielded from incremental changes, with no shift in baseline. A median of 34% of adults across 25 countries have heard or read a lot about AI, while 47% have heard a little and 14% say they've heard nothing at all. Only about a third of these adults experience the incremental changes, while the other 66% are either broadly aware but not calibrated or completely unaware [2].

These people may see the occasional headline and be blown away by the perceived magnitude of the change. There is a real cost to this calibration, however. The same mechanism that lets you parse incremental progress also dulls your response to genuine alarm. An informed baseline is only an advantage if it preserves the capacity for urgency. Humanity is at a tipping point, and technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace. Innovations in AI and biotech alone present our world with a future vastly different from our current standard of living. For these changes to occur as a net positive, benefiting all and serving as a catalyst towards a harmonious world, it is imperative that all humans both understand and proactively participate in the coming revolution.

Otherwise, I believe that these innovations will lead to division, destruction, and quite possibly, deletion.

References

[1] Ross, H. E. (1995). Weber then and now. Perception, 24(6), 599–602.

[2] Pew Research Center. (2025, October 15). How People Around the World View Artificial Intelligence. Based on nationally representative surveys of 28,333 adults conducted from January 8 to April 26, 2025, across 25 countries.