The Three Laws of Staying Human Online
What Isaac Asimov Can Teach Us About Outsmarting Our Own Algorithms
Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.
—David Foster Wallace
Above: Connection demands separation.
In 1942, Isaac Asimov sketched his now-canonical “Three Laws of Robotics” in the short story “Runaround”and later popularized them in I, Robot. The rules (i.e. protect humans, obey humans, preserve yourself—in that order) became shorthand for every dinner-table debate about tech, ethics, and everything in between.
Years later, he slipped in a Zeroth Law (“A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”) to remind us that collective flourishing outranks any single command.
Thirty-plus years after Asimov’s death, the danger isn’t homicidal androids, but rather a million painless taps that train us to obey. If you listen closely, you can almost hear his pained cry from the grave: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
Below is a humans-only reimagining of his code: rules for surviving both social media and generative-AI life with mind, body, and soul intact.
Zeroth Law
Put embodied life first; algorithms and audiences can wait.
A sunrise is already perfect; it doesn’t need a timestamp, filter, or hashtag.
First Law
Do not, by posting or scrolling, wound your own mind—nor let passive drift do the job for you.
Schedule sunlight before blue light; silence online often sounds like peace offline.
A meta-analysis across 12 cohort studies found that every added hour of daily screen time lifts depression risk by roughly 10%.
A three-year study tracking almost 12,000 tweens showed that more social-media use predicted higher depression scores, while depression did not predict heavier use.
Second Law
Shield undeveloped minds from unfiltered AI, unless doing so would harm embodied life.
Even AI insiders argue that no one under thirteen should roam chatbot playgrounds unsupervised, urging stricter age gates and real guardrails.
Until regulators move, parents and teachers must stand in the gap: reading transcripts, gating access, and modeling restraint.
Third Law
Treat personal data and memories as non-renewable; spend them with deliberation and dignity.
Oversharing feels like connection, yet “problematic social-media use” predicts lower happiness and thinner offline relationships.
Before you post, ask: does this nourish real community or auction a sliver of my interior life for stray dopamine?
When the Internet Was for People
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Putting the Laws to Work
The 24-Hour Rule: Live the moment today; narrate it tomorrow. One night’s distance filters vanity and protects intimacy
Screen-Sun Swap: Trade one doom-scroll for an AirPod-free walk. Dopamine settles; vitamin D and actual conversation rise
Quarterly Data Diet: Delete one metric-obsessed app every three months. Quantify everything and you drain life of its quality
AI Chaperone: Treat large language models like power tools: brilliant in trained hands, disastrous in curious little ones
When we quantify every breath, memories become currency and attention becomes extractive fuel. The irony follows: the most visible lives online are often the least present within themselves.
If we're not careful, Chuck Palahniuk’s fantasy may become prophecy:
Old George Orwell got it backward.
Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.
He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
Let the robots keep their three rules.
These are ours now—written in neither firmware nor bytes, but flesh and blood, freely chosen every time we close an app, put down our black mirrors, look up, and step back into a world that can never be summed up by swipe, click, or prompt.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom