Blue light sunscreen
Saw something whilst being lost down the rabbit hole of which sunscreen to buy, only to come across a mad tea party of something rather intriguing, that left my thoughts wondering in wonderland.
I saw an ad today for blue-light sunscreen. Sunscreen, for screens. Something to protect your skin from the glow of devices that we built, willingly placed in our hands, and now apparently need protection against. Funny little loop, isn't it?
Because this same pattern keeps repeating everywhere. We make AI that tries to write like a person, and then we build AI detectors to tell us whether it was actually written by a person. Then we build AI humanisers to trick the detectors again. A machine learning how to imitate us, another learning how to expose the imitation, and then another one learning how to hide it. It starts to feel less like progress and more like a hall of mirrors where every reflection requires another one to correct it.
It makes me wonder what evolution is supposed to look like in a situation like this.
We tend to imagine evolution as a straight line, invention followed by improvement, improvement followed by refinement. But lately it feels more circular. We invent something powerful, realise it alters us in ways we didn’t anticipate, and then spend the next decade designing ways to protect ourselves from what we just created. The sunscreen for the screen. The filter for the algorithm. Masks for the pollution. Chemotherapy for the microplastics. The digital detox for the digital life.
Have we advanced so far that we now have to build protective layers against our own progress? Or is this simply what evolution actually looks like, a series of adjustments, instead of a simple March forward, each new tool requiring another tool to soften its impact?
Perhaps, evolution has never been about moving away from the past at all. Perhaps it’s about accumulating technologies and learning to live with all of them at once. The fire and the smoke, the internet and the burnout, the AI and the paranoia about whether anything we see on these screens is human anymore.
And maybe the weird part isn’t that we need to protect ourselves from our own inventions.
Maybe, it’s how quickly we accept that we will.
