Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who invented cybernetics, warned in 1950 that the most dangerous machines are not the ones that malfunction — they are the ones that do exactly what they're told. He was thinking about automated weapons systems, but the insight has migrated somewhere more personal: the communication tools you use every day. Every platform that optimizes for engagement, every autocomplete that finishes your sentence, every summarizer that condenses a thread — each is faithfully executing its objective. The problem is that its objective was never quite yours. Confucian thinkers called this *zhengming* — the rectification of names — the idea that when the words we use drift from what we actually mean, our thinking and relationships quietly degrade with them. When a system speaks for you often enough, there's a real question of whose meaning is being rectified. The practical thing: pick one communication context this week where you've been letting a tool do the speaking — email replies, meeting summaries, message drafts — and write it yourself once, slowly, noticing where the tool's version would have diverged.

In the last month, which relationship has been most mediated by tools — summarized, drafted, or filtered — and do you actually know what that person thinks right now?

Drawing from Cybernetics / Confucian ethics — Norbert Wiener