CONCEPT
Creeping Normalcy
The cognitive mechanism — each increment too small to trigger alarm — by which cumulative environmental degradation escapes notice until the threshold of irreversibility has been crossed.
Creeping normalcy is Diamond's term for the cognitive process through which slow, incremental environmental change escapes recognition because each year's conditions are only marginally different from the previous year's. The frog in the gradually heating water does not jump, not because it cannot detect the change, but because the change at any given moment is below the threshold of alarm. Diamond observed the phenomenon empirically in his study of Montana's Bitterroot Valley, where older residents remembered a transformed landscape but could not identify when the transformation had occurred. The concept captures a fundamental vulnerability in how human institutions perceive environmental regime shifts — and, as this book argues, operates with particular force in the AI transition even though the mechanism appears different.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The original formulation emerged from Diamond's fieldwork in Montana and his analysis of historical cases where environmental deterioration accumulated across decades or centuries without triggering adequate institutional response. In the Norse Greenland case, the grasslands eroded year