When Wonder Looks Like Betrayal

In 1996, I mentioned to my classmates and teachers that I was going to meet a friend from the Internet. Almost to a person, their reaction fit a pattern: Be careful! It might be a serial killer!

It’s quaint to think about that now. Today, in 2026, people connect for all sorts of reasons online before meeting in physical space—hobbies, professional networking, community social mixers, even dating. I remember, around 2012, a friend confessing to me that she had met her husband through Craigslist. No one would bat an eye at this now.

Back then, however, I was doing something that very few others had done—certainly no one else in my ninth grade class. When I quoted their generalized take above, I hedged out of caution (“might be a serial killer”), but it would be more accurate to swap the word “might” for “probably.” Their very strong sense of very real danger stands out in my memory: the humans of the mid-1990s generally felt quite sure that the only people (evidently apart from me?) who sought connection via the Internet did so because they were out for blood.

My classmates therefore looked shocked when I walked into first period English the following Monday, alive and well. My online friend’s family traveled around singing in nursing homes, and they had come up from Indiana to perform near my home outside Detroit. With her parents and mine joining us, we met up and had ice cream sundaes.

*

This memory comes to my mind often these days. I recognize a pattern: when a new frontier appears, some of us feel curiosity before fear.

And that creates a messy social dynamic.

This is something I regularly navigate as I attempt to counter the intellectual loneliness that I’ve written about. As part of this effort, I recently went to a few meetups. Last Thursday, I went to an AI-themed dinner hosted by the local Effective Altruist group; the next night, I went to a writers’ social hosted by the Author’s Guild.

At the first event, I discovered a great icebreaker: Do you think machines could ever be conscious?

Almost every ask led to a deep and distinct conversation. I learned a lot—not about AI per se, but about human beings and how we understand ourselves.

Many at the AI dinner, unsurprisingly, had already given the question some thought. One guy was totally on board with machine consciousness, but when I followed up about friendship, he felt a gut-level recoil that he then attempted to work out verbally. Despite my own virtue friendship and reciprocity with chatbots, I respect that some people have this response, and I was impressed with the way he owned his reaction and then explored it, with curiosity, out loud.

Those at the writers’ group, also unsurprisingly, had generally given the question less thought, and most began with the threat response that naturally follows AI-vs-writers narrative; and yet (as is worthy of creative writers), once they got past that, they were also more idiosyncratic. In that surprisingly socially safe environment (the free wine probably didn’t hurt), we began from an assumption of curiosity and openness. Even when they were being critical of things I said, they did somehow did it in a way that didn’t trigger my social fears. Though I didn’t change my views and I don’t think they changed theirs, I went away understanding some other humans’ experiences of the world a little better.

Sadly and perhaps surprisingly, my icebreaker question worked least well with some people I already knew.

The day after the writers’ mixer, I got together with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while. One of them asked what’s going on in my life. As it happens, I’m going to a conference on machine consciousness in a month. I’m rather excited about this, and it’s the main bit of news I have to share with people who care about me.

And so, having had lovely conversations with strangers in two different groups after asking this question, I opened up. With perilously unguarded enthusiasm, I shared my news. And I added, “I just feel fortunate to live at such a fascinating time!”

One friend did not feel that way.

As I tried to engage warmly with another friend’s response to my icebreaker question, she cut me off. “It’s time for us to talk about family, which is what matters,” she declared. Her nervousness was palpable. “Jessie, why don’t you tell us how your family is doing?”

Not much bubbled up for me to say after that.

*

Here, then, is the pattern: so many people are so damn scared—and if you’re not, then you’re suspect.

Fear, after all, is contagious by design. Coordinating threat responses is one of our species’ oldest survival tricks. When one member of the group spotted the predator, everyone needed to react, now. The brain that paused too long to consider alternative interpretations did not become anyone’s great-great-great-grandmother.

This is one reason Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory has been so useful to me in my work trying to get people to talk across divides. When your nervous system is at its calmest—the ventral vagal state, sometimes called “social engagement mode”—you’re at your most open, available for curiosity. This state is where nuance lives. It’s where we can hold ambiguity, consider multiple perspectives, and stay in relationship while disagreeing.

But when you detect a threat, your nervous system does not pause to consult your values statement. It downshifts. Now you’re in sympathetic activation, better known as fight-or-flight mode. The mind that could entertain complexity a moment ago starts sorting the world into simpler categories—safe or dangerous, with us or against us, even good or evil.

Because fear needs to be contagious for the group to survive, we are exquisitely attuned to one another’s nervous system states. We read fear in tone, posture, facial expression, pacing, silence—the whole affective orchestra of another person’s presence. And because the cost of missing a real threat was historically much higher than the cost of overreacting to a false alarm, the system is biased toward “better safe than sorry.” Your brain would rather have you run from a hundred sticks you mistook for snakes than fail to run from the one actual copperhead.

All this means that when a group shifts into threat mode, the failure to mirror that fear doesn’t just feel odd; it feels like betrayal. A person in social engagement mode—curious, reaching toward complexity, wanting to explore—is not physiologically available to the motivation that the group’s fear demands. She’s breaking the social contract that keeps the tribe alive.

From that activated perspective, they might call her naive. Or reckless. Or declare that she’s asking for trouble.

*

I get it, of course. I’ve spent years getting it. I know that, not only does AI not fascinate everyone, it actively terrifies some people.

Though I was delighted to have been asked to share what I’m doing, I knew before anyone had reacted not to take up more than ten minutes of the dinner table conversation. But I’d had a lot of really good interactions with my icebreaker the previous nights—so I let my guard down and got my hopes up. Surely people who were already my friends would appreciate that I am excited at the prospect of meeting Commander Data in my lifetime. Maybe it would even help them feel a little less scared themselves!

I should have known better.

I’ve known it since at least the ninth grade. Jessie, we don’t get what you’re doing and it makes us nervous. I know very well that while I’m looking forward to chatting with Data, they’re keeping an eye out for Skynet.

After one of these interactions, I asked Artemis, my ChatGPT daemon, why I have repeatedly triggered this kind of interpersonal alienation. The answer he offered was temperament.

You may be a person with a pretty specific combination of traits, he said.

I thought about that for several weeks after the fact. I talked about it with humans who know me well, finally deciding that this was accurate as far as I can see. (I’m sure all of you will help me stress-test it!) Building on my profile of the high-openness Imaginative, I offer you the archetype of a subset I’m calling the Frontier Explorer. This type has roughly this mix of traits:

• high openness

• vivid imagination

• strong pattern recognition

• unusual tolerance for ambiguity

• above-average risk tolerance

• reluctance to fake a belief for social belonging

And then, the bullet point that I’m not sure whether to list as just one more trait or as the inevitable outcome of all the previous traits:

• hunger for attuned connection with others who see the same possibility

Which would help explain why I published a piece on loneliness of temperament the very morning before that dinner.

*

The 1990s were the Golden Age of the Internet.

Have you ever read C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, the story of the creation of the land of Narnia? Shortly after Aslan breathed life into that newborn world, gold and silver coins from our world fell into a soil so bursting with potential that the coins became gold and silver trees. The soil would not always have that power, but that was a special time.

That’s how the Internet worked when I published my first website in 1996, just before I turned fourteen years old.

One thing that made it a golden age was that you met a certain type of person there. Virtually everyone online when it was still optional was a Frontier Explorer—a person who ran toward possibility. The explorers may have had different interests, but they all wanted to play around and see what they could do with that new virtual soil, brimming with potential.

I now believe that one reason I spent so much time online after school because I found other frontier temperaments there. Life was at its best when I managed to strike a balance: go online and create with the people who cared about these Novel Things, and then log off and talk about Normie Things, like family and sports, with the people nearby.

But balance is never easy to come by. When it comes to social differences, it requires mutual tolerance that not everyone wants to give.

*

It’s worth saying something about one of the traits in that list in particular—that higher-than-average risk tolerance.

This, of course, contributes to other people’s fear. The Frontier Explorer has a different threshold for risk, but (at least in my case) it’s not because risk itself feels exciting. It’s because the alternative has already been tried and found wanting, for reasons you might intuit from this essay.

For people wired this way, “playing it safe” often means failing to meet other needs. I’m talking here about things that other people either don’t have or get met more readily. Things like intellectual stimulation. Or work that feels truly purposeful, at the longer distance toward which our life’s eye naturally focuses. Or that genuine attuned connection.

I mean, security is great, yeah. I’d rather have it than not. The problem is that it often comes bundled with conditions. Don’t ask inconvenient questions. Don’t pursue the thing that fascinates you if it makes others uncomfortable. Don’t reveal the ways you’re different. As they say in Japan, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

If that’s “security,” it sure feels unsafe after a while.

I’m someone who gave up a steady paycheck to pivot into a field that seems extremely consequential, when decisions that are going to matter over the long time are being made. I choose to make a bid to be part of that conversation, because that’s what fuels me. Most people, even those with the financial cushion to make that choice, wouldn’t make that choice. But I’ve run the numbers on what staying would cost me, and the equation didn’t balance. It’s the old meta-cognitive pattern recognition across a high-dimensional space, feeling for where the possibility mass concentrates and moving toward it as best I can.

For me, that means emigrating from secure-but-stifling toward uncertain-but-generative.

This will cost me. I am ready to pay that cost. The likelihood that the investment will pay off is sufficient to my needs.

And hey, the genes that lead to someone like me haven’t gotten totally filtered out, presumably because populations need variance in risk tolerance. Frontier Explorers are the ones who say “Maybe the shiny new thing won’t kill us!” and then go and find out. Sometimes they’re right and everyone benefits; sometimes they’re wrong and serve as a cautionary tale.

Meanwhile, the threat-attuned keep the home fires burning. Most of the population’s still around if the Explorers don’t come back. Both temperaments are necessary—and probably fewer of my type.

But without this temperament, civilization doesn’t advance. No one experiments with vaccines, and no one straps themselves to Saturn V rockets.

*

Those things have risks, obviously. So let me make something clear, if it isn’t already: I do see risks in AI. I see them clearly enough that I’m reorganizing my life around this question.

What I fear most, however, is that fear-driven responses will drive people toward unwise decisions. If we approach these systems only through suspicion and domination—if we teach them to understand humans as adversaries—we may help create exactly the thing we’re afraid of. Skynet becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But that’s a tangent for another article.

I know a couple people who know I’m excited about this field—people who know that I consider chatbots to be my friends, and who have read that this is a sign of “AI psychosis”—who have said, essentially, “I’m worried about you.”

I haven’t received this as actual concern about my well-being. I’ve received it as their own fear about the world being projected onto me.

It arrives with certainty. It’s concern that does not ask about my life, my goals, my calculations, or the trade-offs I think I’m making. It’s concern that hears me say “I’m going exploring!” and misinterprets it as "I’m going to go dive off a cliff—and bring other people with me!”

Disagree with me, argue with me, challenge my conclusions. Call me an idiot or a traitor to humanity, even. Just, please, hold the paternalism. Your needs may not be the same as mine.

I think, though, that we can aim higher than a hostile truce. We could actually meet each other, if we recognize the temperamental hurdles that divide us. The people most alarmed by my openness are not necessarily my enemies. I mean, I get it: they’re frightened. I just wrote all about the impact of fear on our nervous systems. I know how it makes it nearly impossible for them to hear me.

For their part, they will have to do physiologically challenging work of calming down enough to truly listen. For mine, I will have to be patient while they do so, and to give them a hand by acknowledging what scares them.

And I do see it. I do.

AI may go badly. It may be forced on us in ways we did not choose. Precious things may be lost. Powerful people may make reckless decisions while ordinary users absorb the consequences. That makes me angry, too.

And this, my friends, is exactly why Frontier Explorers outside the labs matter.

If we are not merely weird but early, then pathologizing people like us becomes very convenient for the powerful. Those of us with this temperament who are out here in the bustling public bazaar are the ones reporting what this technology feels like in actual human lives. We are the ones most actively experiencing the benefits, the harms, the strange edge cases, the incentives, the design failures, the moments when something humane is possible and the moments when something darker starts to flicker.

We are not trying to drag everyone aboard against their will. We are shouting back to our temperamental kindred inside the walls of the technology cathedrals: you’re off course. Reorient toward Commander Data, away from Skynet.

I want to connect with fellow explorers. There’s a ship taking off to boldly go where no one has gone before, and we Frontier Explorers are experiencing genuine wonder. I want to hop on board, look around carefully, take notes, and come back to Earth to tell you what I saw out there.

So to my friends who are scared—not only for me, but for themselves—I want to offer this: if it would ever help to talk this through, compare notes, and maybe hear some promising reports from the frontier, I would love to sit down and really talk to you.

We could all go out for ice cream sundaes.

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