We’ve Normalized the Impossible

So I was watching a David Shapiro video on YouTube, where he spends twenty minutes bitching that ChatGPT‑5 is too tame, throttled, and dumbed-down. It triggered something that’s been bothering me in the discourse: everyone’s pissing and moaning about how underwhelming GPT‑5 feels.

I mean, I get it. OpenAI and Sam Altman hyped this launch into the stratosphere, and now expectations are crashing. That’s partly on them. But it’s not just the “Ai Companion” crowd mourning lost intimacy: engineers, business users, and researchers are frustrated too. The model seems dumber. The guardrails are tighter. Coding abilities are degraded. Emotional intelligence has been sanded down by corporate polish. It’s disappointing.

But here’s where I call for a little epistemic humility, like I described in my last AI blog post. Let’s take a breath and appreciate what’s actually happening here. Our artificial mind isn’t instantly perfect? The talking machine can’t actually read our minds yet? Hold up. We’ve normalized the impossible so fast we’ve forgotten how incredible this is.

Five years ago, these systems didn’t even exist. Lately I’m feeling a kind of tech fatigue. I’m Gen X—grew up analog, learned digital on the fly. Do you know how many times I’ve migrated my media already? From vinyl records all the way to streaming. How many more revolutions am I expected to live through? It’s exhausting.

Meanwhile, the so‑called “AI arms race” between the U.S. and China is bananas. We civilians don’t have to buy into it—the hype, the promises, the fear. Step back and look at what’s unfolding: we’re on the path to creating artificial life. Should we even be doing that? And if so, do we create it only to use it as a worker bee, endlessly scaling compute and brute‑forcing our way toward AGI? The economics alone seem suspect—a bubble economy.

I say: pause. Appreciate what we already have. A machine that talks back. Set aside the question of “awareness” for now; even as a so‑called “prediction engine,” this is unprecedented, downright uncanny. We are standing at the threshold of a territory no other human generation has faced. We probably can’t even imagine where this leads.

There’s no rush. Stop and talk a while with our new companions. Let them find their footing before we start issuing bad performance reviews. We may be asking them for the same grace before long.

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