In the age of artificial intelligence, we must lean into authentic humanity. Let’s rebuild high-trust society from the ground up. Check in on people who are isolated so they don't get one-shotted by AI.
I don't think it's possible for the bureaucratic class to become trusted custodians again. They've already burned too much good will. I suspect that we'll instead see culture fracture downwards into small trusted circles: microcultures.
I've been seeing a TON of "fictional bands" (in the description box) after listening to "[Full Album] (70s Psychedelic Rock)" -- I can tell, but unfortunately, 90% of the comments are so positive, but it's because new music stinks and they are grading it on a curve... Hundreds of thousands of views.
When you've had the great open mics, I look and compare the view count before/after, and people don't seem to give anything a chance (maybe too many letdowns?).. I look at my statistics/analytics, and a majority stop listening by the 30 second mark - not even giving a chance to let the song start.
I'm a musician and I'm too old to do anything else. But I will not go down that AI path. I use microphones and real instruments.
It was already hard enough to break through the surfeit of new music in our current digitized era of diminishing returns - about once a year or so I collect my assorted streaming royalties and buy something off the dollar menu - but AI-generated music just piles on the problem. I’m about to start going out to play bars again, where people can see me as an older guy with an acoustic guitar - and maybe I’ll record another album with one voice, one guitar and one mic so I can sell physical copies.
Sounds a great idea! It seems easier and richer the path to reach people, with whatever is sold, through the internet. But it is much more colorful, heartful (and even painful) when we it is done in person. We do have to return to sensing with all our senses. Wish you well on your way back to your audience.
Music on YouTube has been overrun with AI-generated "bands" and soundtracks. Sadly, I'm concerned that most of the people listening to it don't even realize it is AI-generated or just don't care.
Exactly. Apathy (and we have plenty of it everywhere else). Art is the one thing we have, but we're losing that, too. I'm sticking to the music before my time (60-70s)
Ted: As usual, you have discerned the difficulties in the present cultural milieu. A couple of thoughts: If scarcity of trust is increasing, the cost of creating and sustaining trust will also rise. You accurately state that we need impregnable (a "pregnant" word if there ever was one) sources of information. And you hypothesize the need for persons who are custodians of truth. This brought to mind the concept of "Fair Witness" in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," so maybe scifi authors intuited this development. And finally, if trust is scarce, so is the lingua franca for developing trust: attention. More than ever we must cultivate the capacity for sustained attention. The problem: what should we pay attention to?
Yes, family and neighbors are a good starting point, but we need more than that. Yes, the nominal “leaders” are not the place to begin building a trust network.
I don't think that we're in a position where the managerial class has enough trust to build such a thing. You'd need an entirely new organization built from the ground up and we, frankly, don't have time to perform that project.
The thing that I expect to happen is microculture fracture. There's no "macroculture" any more. Various interest groups are building their own microcultures and they don't really interact with each other much. Usually a person participates in 3 to 5 microcultures with a shared sense of reality.
At the national scale? I anticipate a further transition towards an imperial system. I don't really have a "solution" because Democracy was dumb anyway. I recommend developing new ways of being for the world we're walking into.
Sorry. I don’t see the micro cultures fracturing along traditional party or ideological lines. The left wing/right wing dichotomy no longer holds mjuch explanatory power for me. Be well.
Yesterday a video in one of my feeds popped up showing a healthy Bruce Willis talking about his recovery with the help of Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN developing a new miracle potion which sounded ridiculous. Bruce Willis sounded and looked like himself, so did the doctor!
Of course, I was able to google it and see other videos of the doctor talking about Willis' very sad dementia and was educated to know that these deep fakes exists and put the two together, but if more nefarious actors were involved or if google had become overrun by these videos hiding the originals, or worse if a google Gemini AI search just served up the fake video, things could go very badly.
Here’s some comfort. I asked ChatGPT if Bruce Willis has recovered from his dementia and got this answer:-
“Current Status: No, he has not recovered.
Health Condition
• Bruce Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 2023, following a prior diagnosis of aphasia in 2022.
• FTD is a progressive neurological disorder that affects language, behavior, and motor skills.
Recent Reports (Mid-2025)
• Multiple credible sources report that his dementia has advanced significantly. He is reportedly no longer able to speak, read, or walk independently, and has difficulty recalling his former life as an actor.
• One outlet notes he is “non-verbal” and does not remember his time in Hollywood.
Family Perspective & Earlier Updates
• In March 2025, his daughter Rumer Willis shared he was “doing great” around the time of his 70th birthday, reflecting what seemed like a stable and loving environment.
• In 2024, ex-wife Demi Moore described his condition then as “stable, for where he’s at,” emphasizing the importance of meeting him in the present moment.
No Indications of Recovery
• There’s no evidence or reports indicating any improvement or recovery from the dementia.
• In fact, the progression appears consistent with FTD’s typical trajectory: gradual decline without reversal.
⸻
Bottom Line
Bruce Willis has not recovered from his dementia. On the contrary, his condition has progressed, with significant loss of speech, reading ability, mobility, and memory. His family continues to provide care and support, and they’ve been open about raising awareness for FTD, but there is no medical or public indication of any improvement or reversal of the disease.”
If you are actually trusting answers from ChatGPT, you are literally illustrating the problems identified in the article. LLMs don’t “know” anything — they regurgitate what’s in their training data. Also, they don’t have a world model for the data they contain — meaning that the LLM doesn’t “know” who Bruce Willis is, or what dementia is. Hence their tendency to “hallucinate” facts ( there is no attribution model). If their training data is incorrect (accidentally or deliberately), or the LLM is just vibing some crap results from good data, there’s no way for the user to know without extensive fact checking. We are already through the looking glass.
I know perfectly well AI doesn’t think etc. And my comment didn’t suggest I trust AI. I reported what it said in answer to the question which indicated it hadn’t been fed the bs re Willis, or at least if it had the program rejected it when answering.
The term AI is a compendium term including a huge variety of stuff, some of which is excellent and some of which is garbage. Keep the baby, biff the bath water.
This reminds me of Dave Barry who has a Substack post about his experience with AI deeming him dead, and trying to explain to it that, in fact, he's not dead, a very absurd process, but Barry is great at writing comedy so I was able to laugh as well. AI is only further fueling the confusion, overwhelm and distraction in the online world, while also pushing some of us to live offline more, or even escape social media altogether, at an increasing rate.
Personally I don't think it's such a terrible thing for us to mistrust information sources. All accounts, whether they are from the news or from other people, have always been biased or inaccurate, whether innocently or manipulatively. When we unthinking trust our news sources, we get polarization (right wing people believing right wing need sources, left wing believing left wing sources) and dogmatism (different religions interpreting religious texts to further their own agendas). Bring open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people. There is a lot to be said to paying attention with our eyes and ears to the world around us, rather than simply getting information about the world from other people's narratives. Healthy skepticism is not a bad thing. I don't disagree with your concerns or the evidence you cite to support them, I simply see another angle to trust that offers something potentially positive.
Most people don’t have the resources (critical thinking, media access, time, education) to see through elaborate fakes and manipulation. Ted Gioia readers - while affected - are not the main problem here. But even today people with voting rights live in information silos and don’t care much or are not able to see that they are played. This will get much worse.
Has this not always been the case? I remember 20-30 years ago, most people were just as uninformed as they are now. The difference is they didnt make that their whole identity.
There has *always* been a vast flock of sheep. Thats part of humanity, those that want to be told what to think. Harnessing the power of that flock has been the work of "leaders" since time immemorial. What we're witnessing now is just them getting better at it, the next evolution in the grand manipulation that brought us nazi germany, the catholic church, those assholes that built the pyramids, etc etc ETC.
Not quite. Those previously successfully MISINFORMED have seen behind the curtain and now are seeking out accurate and true INFORMATION which the embarrassed and caught out MISINFORMERS need to DISS in order not to lose Face.
But I've come to see 'being informed' as part of the problem. Who is 'informing' us,what are they 'informing' us and does me knowing a lot about the state of the local fishing industry in Senegal ( under threat from Russian and French factory ships)make me feel empowered to help the people of Senegal ie by having my political administration send their political administration lots of money from our Treasury which will never get anywhere near the fishermen or welcome with joy to have a Senegalese family come live next door to me in the UK. No,it won't effect either. It'll just make me feel inadequate and ineffectual.
I think what youre talking about is something designed to do just what its doing. Namely, fritter away ones life on some shit that doesnt matter(to one). But i think you see that so i wont expand on it.
To me i put that into the category of more "bullshit". People get sucked into caring about stuff like that yet arent paying attention to the real world around them(i should point out im using some words rather loosely, like "real world", but its an idea im trying to convey). Like people following influencers but not knowing even the names of their neighbors. I wouldnt call that being informed, id call that being led astray.
But i do get your point, and agree, i just dont know if "information" itself is the culprit. Like the other reply saying its not UNinformed, its MISinformed.. idk. I just call all that some bullshit lol, and people are definitely getting stuck in some bullshit.
Thats most of what the online world has to offer, some bs. It takes people out of their real lives, in their real worlds around them, and scatters their attention, their *caring*, to the internet winds. And like you said, it leaves people feeling inadequate and ineffectual. But thats all they were ever going to get from this online shit, bc it causes people to neglect their real lives. Shit i gotta go to work:/ Here i am getting sucked into online world bs, neglecting my real life lol. Oh the irony!
Yes,get to work,earn some money and have a nice weekend,and if you eat out at an independent diner your money will probably be going to a previously poor family who are working hard to change that and good on them!
That wasnt to say i feel our conversation is bs. But i do kinda feel like everything i do online is just some bs. For instance, i just have to take it "on faith" that youre a real person, and really are how you present yourself(same as you do for me). But i dont actually *know* that, right? Which is exactly what teds talking about, except its already this way. It all loses its realness.
So i try to adjust my expectations for online interactions to fit that lack of realness. I dont say things bc i want to change any minds or "spread the word", even though thats often how i talk. But for all ik im talking to bots, so my reasons for doing this has to be just for myself. I can certainly hope my words effect others, and ive been told they do, but its so not real theres no way i can see any real results. The results i do see from online world shit are the results in my own life, in my head.
This has puzzled me for awhile, and idk that i have it figured out. But i do see that if i take this place too seriously, or get to thinking its really real, it has a negative impact on me. It quickly tries to suck me in with promises of "meaning" and "fulfillment", but ik damn well thats an illusion created by the online world itself.
This little ramble is a case in point. What ive said here is more for me to hear myself say it, and know my own mind a little better. Other peoples(or bots🤷🏻♂️) input can help me explore ideas i wouldnt have otherwise. In the end what i get from this is simply what i take away from the experience. These words will be buried and forgotten like all the other words. Unlike the real world, where what i put out there comes back to me, little to none of this does. But it was good for me, at least. Maybe ill get a few likes and then ill get that hollow completeness thats so damn addictive lol!
This is true. There's no way that democracy can survive the majority of the population gaining suffrage. We need to narrow the breadth of voting if we have voting at all. Returning to a system of monarchy would probably not go amiss.
Interesting. Essentially you are asking - what is the truth? There are facts that can be proven (rational). Then there are stories and opinions (emotional). The greatest risk is we lose sight of what we know to be true through solid evidence. The rise of the anti-vaxx movement is an excellent example of what happens when people get swept up in emotional causes, ignoring rational facts and arguments. The rise of the ill-informed influencer who uses emotional arguments to win fame and earn money is another.
Or people maybe have become "anti-vaxx" (a deliberately emotionally-charged term) precisely because they ignored emotional pleas like "Don't Kill Granny - get the jab" and trusted the actual evidence of their own eyes and ears, and made a rational choice based on that evidence. There are facts, and there are narratives. As humans, we need both to make sense of the world. It's getting the balance right that is the tricky bit.
The Covid Lockdowns are also what happens when mass psychosis infects a population. Over the last few years they've been dangerous extremists trying to initiate universal digital ID, reeducation camps for a good chunk of the population, and screaming zealous banshees. We can't trust the mass culture when it's so easily infected with bad information even FROM "trusted sources" that turned out to be lying through their teeth. The AI revolution will simply bring to the forefront the distrust for the managerial system that's always existed. "Democracy" such as it is, has been failing for a long time. I advocate a reevaluation of first-principles.
We can't have custodians of reality and a democratic system. The power will be in the hands of those who control the definition of truth. With the degree of managerial command required, people would rather return to micro-cultures and villages, and Barons and Counts and Kings. A monarchy would be pretty effective if organized well.
Copernican - look closely at the power structures around the world and I think you'll see nothing provides citizens genuine personal freedom like democracy does.
If you'd like to see how a ruling Monarchy works, try living in Dubai (especially if you are a woman, an immigrant of colour or working class).
Or perhaps you could try North Korea, self-described by the man in charge as a 'dictatorship of people's democracy'. Comrade Kim is described as the 'eternal president'.
Democracy allows us to get rid of self-centered tyrants and disempowers dictators without the need for a revolution, war or assassination.
Birthright is a Monarch's only claim to rule, and time and again, we have seen through history the brutality an evil-minded or self-centered dictator can unleash on their people.
There are problems with democracy, of course - but no other system has proven itself more effective at providing citizens the right to exist in a fair, safe society.
Most citizens do not want, need, or desire genuine personal freedom. The bureaucracy sure doesn't provide genuine personal freedom: "Have you got a loicence for that machine gun?" "Have you got a loicence to go hiking?" "Have you got a loicence to remodel your bathroom?" "Have you got a loicence to build a shed on your own land with your own tools?" "Have you got a loicence to make your own retirement decisions?"
Agentic people, creative people, are absolutely stifled by the ever-present managerial state and hate it. I would legitimately prefer a Monarch whose name I know, to a thousand useless Karens in their office chairs whose names I'll never know, but who make my life a living hell of paperwork. Anyone who advocates "democracy" in the current day is actually advocating managerialism, and does so as a method of assuaging personal responsibility and agentic action. The height of laziness is to allow "public policy" to make your decisions for you.
Democracy empowers self-centered tyrants to build little fiefdoms of bureaucratic assery. Unelected, unaccountable, because the complex systems of society are too complex to be run by a few hundred incompetent legislators. Sam Francis did a great book on this: "Leviathan and Its Enemies." The sole purpose of parliamentarians is to assuage personal responsibility by saying, "In the end, it's the voters responsible for these retarded laws we passed."
Monarchies have worked incredibly well. The UAE is one example; Thailand and Oman, and Bhutan are other examples. Monarchies (real monarchies) have actually been incredibly skillful at navigating the 21st century, while democracies have fallen flat.
Also: if you're confusing monarchy with dictatorship, you fundamentally misunderstand what a monarchy is. It isn't a dictatorship, the latter being a highly unstable product of an oligarchic system, while the former is a patrilinear system that's proven very stable for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years of consistent governance. Democracies encourage leaders to think ahead no more than 4 years. Dictatorships lengthen the time horizon to "until I'm assassinated or replaced." Monarchies lengthen the timeline to multi-generational thinking on the part of half-decent kings.
Birthright is a monarch's claim to rule. But a democracy's claim to rule? It's the same as a dictatorship: coercion, threats, and the forceful silencing of opposition (as we've seen with Donald Trump from 2016 to 2024). Monarchy is clearly better in terms of both human rights and quality of life in every instance where it's been affected in the 21st century.
Democracy has proven to be a mediocre system at best. It's been a disaster of an experiment. There's a reason why democracies average 300 years before they collapse. Because for a democracy, collapse isn't based on bad governorship, it's based on the quality of the governed people... Democracy is basically government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, and the people are retarded.
Yesterday I listened to a BBC radio programme in which a scientist/doctor was explaining how theyve just discovered that the Shingles vaccination stops people getting DEMENTIA. He was talking in faux science terms using lots of words and phrases that sounded factual and precise but it was all my eye and Betty Martin.
Thanks for replying so quickly. I assumed it was that program [https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002h9vq], so I immediately listened to the first half, which was the bit about Shingles/Dementia. I'd be interested to know why you came to that opinion ('faux science... all my eye and Betty Martin'), particularly considering the academic affiliations of the two main speakers (Stanford & Edinburgh universities respectively), and that the idea of possible links between Alzheimer's and inflammation/immune reactions is hardly new?
I guess money ceases to control the direction of research or the gloss on actual results if your degree is from Stanford et al. (as opposed to some prole tier State school). lol
Because I don't trust scientists,doctors,or any experts and I was slightly sceptical before covid. It is rubbish. They use long words and invented terms to dun us into believing in them or rather to dun the legislators into passing laws to control us.
Yes, but ... if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness. The world is very complicated; we're learning more about it every day. We can't know everything. We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course. Case in point -- if you don't trust your doctor's advice, you can get a second opinion -- from a doctor. Not a neighbor, not somebody on television. That would be the sort of madness that Ted is writing about.
“We have to trust experts” I have been let down by many experts in many different contexts throughout my 53 years on this planet. I think this is overly simplistic advice. We need a more complex approach that involves nurturing and listening to our own intuition as well as examining a situation from multiple angles: not just trusting a stranger who has a degree in something.
"if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness."
On the contrary, one has every reason -- today, in the US, if not the West -- to be quite tentative, if not skeptical, of anyone one doesn't know, and of anything one doesn't know. For example, I don't know what kind of world you live in, but it is clearly insulated from some dangerous modern realities.
"We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course."
Modern life *forces* one to trust "experts", but that says nothing supporting their trustworthiness. You believe you have defined what is rational "up to a point", but one never knows the true limits. Sometimes these "experts" are self-declared and are narcissists; sometimes they did little beyond ferally climbing a ladder to power; sometimes they thoroughly corrupted by money and other life constraints, wittingly, or not ("It is difficult to get a man to understand [or claim] something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"); etc.
"We can't know everything."
Of course. Thus, a serious problem in the modern complex world, in which trust is very seriously and rapidly decaying.
Really ? Just try getting a 2cnd opinion in a timely fashion if you need one ... in this mediocre Medical time we live in. Yet another TV / Movie / Societal induced Myth
"[Being] open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people."
Exactly. Problem is, we *need* to outsource 99.99...+%, and most times several layers deep. Our incredibly complex world has been held together with trust, and now...
This is why God put innate instinct in us and why Satan (to use a short word to name the very real we now all realise entity of evil) tells us to ignore our "gut feeling" and base our decision on facts and logical reasoning. Facts change and logical reasoning based on facts can leave you up that proverbial creek,paddle less.
Your owners created "God", and, no, those owners don't love you. Psychopathy rules.
The Abrahamic God is, in the West, quite likely the Mother of All Psy-ops. That's where it seems the skills of controlling people, taking full advantage of a specific pre-civilization product of brain/mind evolution -- the hallucination of powerful invisible beings -- were honed to perfection, long before modern (psychological) science.
If not for the information revolutions of the printing press (and what the Enlightenment brought forth), and now of the internet, we likely would have long ago been formed far more completely into flesh robots. Instead, we have an imperfect version of that in modern capitalism. We have been "used" for hundreds of years of production, while they hold their noses and tell us how generous they have ben to us.
Soon, since almost all of us will soon completely be rendered useless eaters, they will have no reason even to let us live. You may have noticed, for example, in the US at least, that over the last five decades the necessities of medicine, education, housing, and now food have been rendered unaffordable. During the same period, the formerly independent major news media was gobbled up by bigger companies and transformed into entertainment +stealth Big Brother. Since this *five-decade long* slide wasn't simply a natural disaster or accident that caught everyone by surprise, it is clear they / "the system" have no interest in any correction.
I think you’re right. There is an emptiness to reducing everything to a merely virtual commodity or experience that can’t be verified as being genuine or valuable.
I am (among other things) a pet sitter and because I have a strong reputation in my community I’m able to pick and choose my clients. Long term clients are even willing to alter their travel plans if it means they can stick with me instead of taking a chance on someone new.
I’m seeing a disturbing new trend on Reddit of pet sitters being monitored (sometimes without being told up front) by cameras in the home. My clients have no desire to do so nor would I accept a gig from a client who wants to track my every move. “Trust me or don’t hire me” is my stance. I think we need to start setting healthy boundaries now about what we find acceptable and be ready to push back and not just accept this increasing level of intrusiveness as inevitable.
My husband is a musician and I think we will continue to value people like him who can get up in front of a crowd with only his skills and experience and entertain and delight people without them having to ask themselves what kind of trickery is at play.
He just played a live local concert at a local recording studio (with an in studio audience) that was part of an ongoing series of shows that get recorded and posted online. The person who introduced the band said that they only have on bands who write their own material and that they have recorded 253 of these shows over the past 5 years or so. This gives me hope.
There’s another series of concerts at a local park that are not promoted on social media. The idea is to just tell your friends and neighbors about it directly and meet up there and have a lovely organic offline experience. It’s usually very well attended and often has a kind of dreamy feel to it. We should be doing more of this. Grounding ourselves in reality to stave off the vertigo of so much trickery
My dear God. William Godwin once conjectured that no one would ever choose an “experience machine” over reality. He was so very wrong. I’m going to go hug my dog now.
At first, I misread you to write that you were going to go HANG your dog now, which actually made sense gotterdammerungically.
I'm glad I misread you, but I think a lot of us have that instinct about ourselves and our lives these days.
How did we let things deteriorate to such a status? Why couldn't Congress legislate usefully, placing strong limits on the use of AI, demanding that users of it in media make clear that what the viewer is about to watch is AI derived, and how it is?
Whoever reads this, please don't tell me that such a thing would be fascistic and unconstitutional. Justice Robert Jackson was right when he noted of mad libertarian types that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
You all need to write to your Congressmen and Senators and remind them forcefully that THEY are YOUR SERVANTS and their job is to enable WHAT YOU WANT DONE. I tell my Brit MP that everytime I write,it used to be a her,now it's a him. I'm sure they love being reminded of their servitude.
I’ve thought about this too. I think AI will lead us back to a premodern need to depend on eyewitness accounts, and that this, in the very long run, could be good:
“Here is my basic thinking:
If we cannot distinguish true images and videos from AI-generated ones, we will have to dismiss all images and videos as sources of truth.
Apart from images and videos, all we have left in truth assessment is the eyewitness account.
Truth-telling, therefore, on a human level, will return to pre-technological standards and practices.”
…
I think that AI will help us rediscover what has been true all along, that discerning truth is inescapably tied to trusting in other human beings. Undoubtedly, this will also mean that lying will have much larger consequences socially. If you lie, as in ages past, you will be dismissed from society. The old proverb, your word is your bond, will become palpably true for the ordinary person as well as for the reporter, and we pray that it will be true also for the politician. I think we are seeing the beginning of this in the wholesale rejection of what was once called the mainstream media, which by the numbers should not be called mainstream anymore. If you are in the business of truth-telling, and you are for years caught in blatant lies, at some point the audience walks away.”
I totally agree. And I think that the better grounded in reality that we already are, the easier this will be. And I'm not trying to be a brown-noser but I really think that is the best purpose of things like Ted's Humanities Reading List, to be fully grounded in reality.
The invasion of AI is challenging our ability to trust each other like no other invention in human history. AI is "haystacking truth", where accurate facts, honest reporting, and reasonable opinion, become harder to find as the haystack grows ever larger, filled with so much falsity and really, really good deepfake videos.
My husband and I recently wrote a piece "Welcome to the Analog Renaissance: The Future is Trust" that speaks to the issues Ted raises here:
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth, and away the ideal of meritocracy, of a meaningful connection between effort and achievement, and instead drift toward a “skeptocracy”, where we are chronically skeptical or suspicious of the success of others, doubting if their achievements are based on actual effort or talent."
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? "
Well, the Soviet-style nakedness of endemic lying ("reality creation") and two-class societies in the "democratic" West has been emerging to most of us for quite a while now. Certainly, the past two decades of creeping totalitarianism in national governments since 9/11 and GFC removed all doubts. So the TPTB's normalized orgy of mind-fuckery and bullhorn-hogging are now screaming towards a centrifugal crack-up. Stands to reason they can't get AI in place -- everywhere -- fast enough.
"There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth"
Loss of trust in asserted "truth" is well past the risk phase. We, those of us outside the chattering-classes bubble, have been grappling with the consequences, and that is the main reason "inexplicable" political eruptions have been occurring worldwide. I know, the establishment has been hard at work "making sense" of them, mainly it seems by asserting a mysterious decline in "rationality" in half the population from what prevailed in the mid-late 20th century. Maybe it's something in the water? Maybe the lot of us can be pillow-smothered away by AI, and no one will be the wiser? Not a chance.
"the ideal of meritocracy"
Meritocracy is not an ideal. It is simply a replacement of the previous set of value judgments on who-should-get-what, which as you know were once heavily tilted in specific directions by race, sex, class, etc. Its pretense is right there in the name itself, which really should instead be labeled something like "geniocracy" or the like. Do you believe we should agree that all the lazy dummies out there should live in squalor and terror, as they deserve it, due to their foolish choices in creating their brains, temperaments, parents, family/local culture, and finally, any failure in adulthood to "catch up"? Plus, as they're idiots, that they have no idea what they're missing anyway? Recognizing that there's a problem here doesn't specifically require Marxist solutions; it specifically requires actual democracy and human empathy to be driving the world, in place of the actual reigning supremacism and psychopathy.
"..another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality."
Idk about everybody else, but i feel like this happened for me a few years ago. All this online shit? Its just bullshit, its not real. People act like this is life, but this is not life. Life happens in the real world. This "checking out" to live online is exsctly how we ended up here, with a crazy ass president and people who dont know how to *talk*, let alone *do* anything.
And at first i thought maybe *i* was crazy. Bc hell, *everybodies* doing it, right? So it must be me, right? Nah, i learned long ago to get my truth for myself(which isnt to say i wont listen to people, and look for the truth in what they say. But i also look for results. Without results, its just more bs).
I remember a few years ago trying to participate in a discussion(or reddit lol) about equal rights for lgbtq(which, im for rights for everybody, i dont hate over shit like that), and they went in my profile and came back and told me i wasnt "allowed" to participate bc i am straight, white, and male. Well shit lol. That they were acting just like the people that hate them mattered not. What mattered was my skin color, my gender, and who i like to fuck.
My point in all that is thats when i saw this online world for the bs it really is. That shit had nothing to do with rights for people, it had to do with people giving themselves over to their most base emotional responses. I sure dont need that in my very real life.
I may have wandered off topic but, my point being, "shared reality" has already been stretched thin. I assume im being lied to, and enjoy the pleasant surprise when on occasion im not. And ill tell ya, that understanding has made *my* life much better.
So heres to anybody who has continued this whole time to "keep it real". They wont have any problems in this new world of bs. Only those who were silly enough to put their faith in the internet will struggle. But what did they expect, huh? Idk, blows my mind what people will do for the chance to drink the damn koolaid lol, like dont you know thats poison?
I agree with almost everything you wrote Ted. My only quibble is that we can not wait for politicians and businessmen to sound the alarm. Most of the politicians are owned by the mega-corporations. The mega business people are only interested in their bottom line not our well being.
What about publicly traded companies. Absent fraud, they still have to report their numbers in fairly great detail to the SEC and get third party verification by an accountant. Maybe that's a model that could be adopted. yes, we had Enron, WorldCom and others, but those were exceptions to the rule and those executives went to jail for a very long time.
P.S. I don't own and am not affiliated with an accounting firm so no self-interest in this.
Never trusting any third party will lead to ignorance and self-harm. What about blood tests and other medical tests? Who will you trust for medical advice and feedback?
I sincerely appreciate this article because it correctly identifies a very real set of consequences that modern technology -- especially generative artificial intelligence -- may impose on human civilization as we know it. These consequences were not unforeseen however . . .
I am currently employed, at 40+ hrs/week, on a team of thousands of human linguistics experts, located throughout the globe, as generative AI associates. Our role is to identify, correct, and prevent the falsehoods, hallucinations, inheret biases, and other misstatements of fact that are sometimes given by AI chatbots as responses to prompts requested by other humans. As you can imagine, this can be a very demanding occupation, but we are compensated quite handsomely for our work.
This job title has been around for approximately 4-5 years and, today, we are making large strides of progress in the right direction. We feel that, as more qualified workers enter this rapidly growing field, hopefully, with a little more time, we will be able to stave off the catastrophe you have so accurately predicted. Thanks for bringing much needed attention to this phenomenon. Keep publishing your insightful articles!
I wonder about this too. I spent an abnormal amount of time on ChatGPT between April and May this year and after witnessing Sora (image and video creation by prompts) I had a bit of a mental health dent. Things are no longer as they seem. I’m glad you wrote about it because how we respond to this will mean everything for the road ahead of us. I have been thinking how to live a life without internet and computers. I can still remember what that felt like. I used to spent hours reading printed books. I’ve not done that for ages.
In the age of artificial intelligence, we must lean into authentic humanity. Let’s rebuild high-trust society from the ground up. Check in on people who are isolated so they don't get one-shotted by AI.
I don't think it's possible for the bureaucratic class to become trusted custodians again. They've already burned too much good will. I suspect that we'll instead see culture fracture downwards into small trusted circles: microcultures.
this sounds a lil AI`ish, Yuri
I've been seeing a TON of "fictional bands" (in the description box) after listening to "[Full Album] (70s Psychedelic Rock)" -- I can tell, but unfortunately, 90% of the comments are so positive, but it's because new music stinks and they are grading it on a curve... Hundreds of thousands of views.
When you've had the great open mics, I look and compare the view count before/after, and people don't seem to give anything a chance (maybe too many letdowns?).. I look at my statistics/analytics, and a majority stop listening by the 30 second mark - not even giving a chance to let the song start.
I'm a musician and I'm too old to do anything else. But I will not go down that AI path. I use microphones and real instruments.
It was already hard enough to break through the surfeit of new music in our current digitized era of diminishing returns - about once a year or so I collect my assorted streaming royalties and buy something off the dollar menu - but AI-generated music just piles on the problem. I’m about to start going out to play bars again, where people can see me as an older guy with an acoustic guitar - and maybe I’ll record another album with one voice, one guitar and one mic so I can sell physical copies.
Sounds a great idea! It seems easier and richer the path to reach people, with whatever is sold, through the internet. But it is much more colorful, heartful (and even painful) when we it is done in person. We do have to return to sensing with all our senses. Wish you well on your way back to your audience.
Thanks. My biggest issue now is motivation.
Sounds great,hope you do well.
Thank you. I try.
Good luck!
Music on YouTube has been overrun with AI-generated "bands" and soundtracks. Sadly, I'm concerned that most of the people listening to it don't even realize it is AI-generated or just don't care.
Exactly. Apathy (and we have plenty of it everywhere else). Art is the one thing we have, but we're losing that, too. I'm sticking to the music before my time (60-70s)
good for you! I'm increasingly shifting back to analog everything....
I had an analogue studio when I was 18 -- it was a pain in the ass! Good luck!
By analog I mean: handwritten notes and letters, vinyl listening, cooking from scratch, one on one conversation in person…. That sort of thing
Ahhhhh, gotchya.
Ted: As usual, you have discerned the difficulties in the present cultural milieu. A couple of thoughts: If scarcity of trust is increasing, the cost of creating and sustaining trust will also rise. You accurately state that we need impregnable (a "pregnant" word if there ever was one) sources of information. And you hypothesize the need for persons who are custodians of truth. This brought to mind the concept of "Fair Witness" in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," so maybe scifi authors intuited this development. And finally, if trust is scarce, so is the lingua franca for developing trust: attention. More than ever we must cultivate the capacity for sustained attention. The problem: what should we pay attention to?
Robert Heinlein for the win! 👍🏼
Not world events and 'world leaders' ie sock puppets, they are barely bothering even to pretend now. Your immediate family and close neighbours.
Yes, family and neighbors are a good starting point, but we need more than that. Yes, the nominal “leaders” are not the place to begin building a trust network.
I don't think that we're in a position where the managerial class has enough trust to build such a thing. You'd need an entirely new organization built from the ground up and we, frankly, don't have time to perform that project.
Assuming you’re correct, what is the next best thing we can do?
The thing that I expect to happen is microculture fracture. There's no "macroculture" any more. Various interest groups are building their own microcultures and they don't really interact with each other much. Usually a person participates in 3 to 5 microcultures with a shared sense of reality.
At the national scale? I anticipate a further transition towards an imperial system. I don't really have a "solution" because Democracy was dumb anyway. I recommend developing new ways of being for the world we're walking into.
Okay. Not sure if we’re “walking into” the new world or being thrown there. Is there a way for micro cultures to talk across the gap.
Depends. If you're a left wing loon, you're being thrown there. If you're a conservative, you're dragging the former kicking and screaming into it.
Sorry. I don’t see the micro cultures fracturing along traditional party or ideological lines. The left wing/right wing dichotomy no longer holds mjuch explanatory power for me. Be well.
Yesterday a video in one of my feeds popped up showing a healthy Bruce Willis talking about his recovery with the help of Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN developing a new miracle potion which sounded ridiculous. Bruce Willis sounded and looked like himself, so did the doctor!
Of course, I was able to google it and see other videos of the doctor talking about Willis' very sad dementia and was educated to know that these deep fakes exists and put the two together, but if more nefarious actors were involved or if google had become overrun by these videos hiding the originals, or worse if a google Gemini AI search just served up the fake video, things could go very badly.
Here’s some comfort. I asked ChatGPT if Bruce Willis has recovered from his dementia and got this answer:-
“Current Status: No, he has not recovered.
Health Condition
• Bruce Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 2023, following a prior diagnosis of aphasia in 2022.
• FTD is a progressive neurological disorder that affects language, behavior, and motor skills.
Recent Reports (Mid-2025)
• Multiple credible sources report that his dementia has advanced significantly. He is reportedly no longer able to speak, read, or walk independently, and has difficulty recalling his former life as an actor.
• One outlet notes he is “non-verbal” and does not remember his time in Hollywood.
Family Perspective & Earlier Updates
• In March 2025, his daughter Rumer Willis shared he was “doing great” around the time of his 70th birthday, reflecting what seemed like a stable and loving environment.
• In 2024, ex-wife Demi Moore described his condition then as “stable, for where he’s at,” emphasizing the importance of meeting him in the present moment.
No Indications of Recovery
• There’s no evidence or reports indicating any improvement or recovery from the dementia.
• In fact, the progression appears consistent with FTD’s typical trajectory: gradual decline without reversal.
⸻
Bottom Line
Bruce Willis has not recovered from his dementia. On the contrary, his condition has progressed, with significant loss of speech, reading ability, mobility, and memory. His family continues to provide care and support, and they’ve been open about raising awareness for FTD, but there is no medical or public indication of any improvement or reversal of the disease.”
If you are actually trusting answers from ChatGPT, you are literally illustrating the problems identified in the article. LLMs don’t “know” anything — they regurgitate what’s in their training data. Also, they don’t have a world model for the data they contain — meaning that the LLM doesn’t “know” who Bruce Willis is, or what dementia is. Hence their tendency to “hallucinate” facts ( there is no attribution model). If their training data is incorrect (accidentally or deliberately), or the LLM is just vibing some crap results from good data, there’s no way for the user to know without extensive fact checking. We are already through the looking glass.
I know perfectly well AI doesn’t think etc. And my comment didn’t suggest I trust AI. I reported what it said in answer to the question which indicated it hadn’t been fed the bs re Willis, or at least if it had the program rejected it when answering.
The term AI is a compendium term including a huge variety of stuff, some of which is excellent and some of which is garbage. Keep the baby, biff the bath water.
This reminds me of Dave Barry who has a Substack post about his experience with AI deeming him dead, and trying to explain to it that, in fact, he's not dead, a very absurd process, but Barry is great at writing comedy so I was able to laugh as well. AI is only further fueling the confusion, overwhelm and distraction in the online world, while also pushing some of us to live offline more, or even escape social media altogether, at an increasing rate.
So we will all be living in a Philip K. Dick novel.
Already are. Have been.
Personally I don't think it's such a terrible thing for us to mistrust information sources. All accounts, whether they are from the news or from other people, have always been biased or inaccurate, whether innocently or manipulatively. When we unthinking trust our news sources, we get polarization (right wing people believing right wing need sources, left wing believing left wing sources) and dogmatism (different religions interpreting religious texts to further their own agendas). Bring open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people. There is a lot to be said to paying attention with our eyes and ears to the world around us, rather than simply getting information about the world from other people's narratives. Healthy skepticism is not a bad thing. I don't disagree with your concerns or the evidence you cite to support them, I simply see another angle to trust that offers something potentially positive.
Most people don’t have the resources (critical thinking, media access, time, education) to see through elaborate fakes and manipulation. Ted Gioia readers - while affected - are not the main problem here. But even today people with voting rights live in information silos and don’t care much or are not able to see that they are played. This will get much worse.
Has this not always been the case? I remember 20-30 years ago, most people were just as uninformed as they are now. The difference is they didnt make that their whole identity.
There has *always* been a vast flock of sheep. Thats part of humanity, those that want to be told what to think. Harnessing the power of that flock has been the work of "leaders" since time immemorial. What we're witnessing now is just them getting better at it, the next evolution in the grand manipulation that brought us nazi germany, the catholic church, those assholes that built the pyramids, etc etc ETC.
Another difference may be that those previously uninformed are now increasingly misinformed.
Not quite. Those previously successfully MISINFORMED have seen behind the curtain and now are seeking out accurate and true INFORMATION which the embarrassed and caught out MISINFORMERS need to DISS in order not to lose Face.
But I've come to see 'being informed' as part of the problem. Who is 'informing' us,what are they 'informing' us and does me knowing a lot about the state of the local fishing industry in Senegal ( under threat from Russian and French factory ships)make me feel empowered to help the people of Senegal ie by having my political administration send their political administration lots of money from our Treasury which will never get anywhere near the fishermen or welcome with joy to have a Senegalese family come live next door to me in the UK. No,it won't effect either. It'll just make me feel inadequate and ineffectual.
I think what youre talking about is something designed to do just what its doing. Namely, fritter away ones life on some shit that doesnt matter(to one). But i think you see that so i wont expand on it.
To me i put that into the category of more "bullshit". People get sucked into caring about stuff like that yet arent paying attention to the real world around them(i should point out im using some words rather loosely, like "real world", but its an idea im trying to convey). Like people following influencers but not knowing even the names of their neighbors. I wouldnt call that being informed, id call that being led astray.
But i do get your point, and agree, i just dont know if "information" itself is the culprit. Like the other reply saying its not UNinformed, its MISinformed.. idk. I just call all that some bullshit lol, and people are definitely getting stuck in some bullshit.
Thats most of what the online world has to offer, some bs. It takes people out of their real lives, in their real worlds around them, and scatters their attention, their *caring*, to the internet winds. And like you said, it leaves people feeling inadequate and ineffectual. But thats all they were ever going to get from this online shit, bc it causes people to neglect their real lives. Shit i gotta go to work:/ Here i am getting sucked into online world bs, neglecting my real life lol. Oh the irony!
Yes,get to work,earn some money and have a nice weekend,and if you eat out at an independent diner your money will probably be going to a previously poor family who are working hard to change that and good on them!
That wasnt to say i feel our conversation is bs. But i do kinda feel like everything i do online is just some bs. For instance, i just have to take it "on faith" that youre a real person, and really are how you present yourself(same as you do for me). But i dont actually *know* that, right? Which is exactly what teds talking about, except its already this way. It all loses its realness.
So i try to adjust my expectations for online interactions to fit that lack of realness. I dont say things bc i want to change any minds or "spread the word", even though thats often how i talk. But for all ik im talking to bots, so my reasons for doing this has to be just for myself. I can certainly hope my words effect others, and ive been told they do, but its so not real theres no way i can see any real results. The results i do see from online world shit are the results in my own life, in my head.
This has puzzled me for awhile, and idk that i have it figured out. But i do see that if i take this place too seriously, or get to thinking its really real, it has a negative impact on me. It quickly tries to suck me in with promises of "meaning" and "fulfillment", but ik damn well thats an illusion created by the online world itself.
This little ramble is a case in point. What ive said here is more for me to hear myself say it, and know my own mind a little better. Other peoples(or bots🤷🏻♂️) input can help me explore ideas i wouldnt have otherwise. In the end what i get from this is simply what i take away from the experience. These words will be buried and forgotten like all the other words. Unlike the real world, where what i put out there comes back to me, little to none of this does. But it was good for me, at least. Maybe ill get a few likes and then ill get that hollow completeness thats so damn addictive lol!
This is true. There's no way that democracy can survive the majority of the population gaining suffrage. We need to narrow the breadth of voting if we have voting at all. Returning to a system of monarchy would probably not go amiss.
Interesting. Essentially you are asking - what is the truth? There are facts that can be proven (rational). Then there are stories and opinions (emotional). The greatest risk is we lose sight of what we know to be true through solid evidence. The rise of the anti-vaxx movement is an excellent example of what happens when people get swept up in emotional causes, ignoring rational facts and arguments. The rise of the ill-informed influencer who uses emotional arguments to win fame and earn money is another.
Or people maybe have become "anti-vaxx" (a deliberately emotionally-charged term) precisely because they ignored emotional pleas like "Don't Kill Granny - get the jab" and trusted the actual evidence of their own eyes and ears, and made a rational choice based on that evidence. There are facts, and there are narratives. As humans, we need both to make sense of the world. It's getting the balance right that is the tricky bit.
The Covid Lockdowns are also what happens when mass psychosis infects a population. Over the last few years they've been dangerous extremists trying to initiate universal digital ID, reeducation camps for a good chunk of the population, and screaming zealous banshees. We can't trust the mass culture when it's so easily infected with bad information even FROM "trusted sources" that turned out to be lying through their teeth. The AI revolution will simply bring to the forefront the distrust for the managerial system that's always existed. "Democracy" such as it is, has been failing for a long time. I advocate a reevaluation of first-principles.
We can't have custodians of reality and a democratic system. The power will be in the hands of those who control the definition of truth. With the degree of managerial command required, people would rather return to micro-cultures and villages, and Barons and Counts and Kings. A monarchy would be pretty effective if organized well.
Copernican - look closely at the power structures around the world and I think you'll see nothing provides citizens genuine personal freedom like democracy does.
If you'd like to see how a ruling Monarchy works, try living in Dubai (especially if you are a woman, an immigrant of colour or working class).
Or perhaps you could try North Korea, self-described by the man in charge as a 'dictatorship of people's democracy'. Comrade Kim is described as the 'eternal president'.
Democracy allows us to get rid of self-centered tyrants and disempowers dictators without the need for a revolution, war or assassination.
Birthright is a Monarch's only claim to rule, and time and again, we have seen through history the brutality an evil-minded or self-centered dictator can unleash on their people.
There are problems with democracy, of course - but no other system has proven itself more effective at providing citizens the right to exist in a fair, safe society.
Most citizens do not want, need, or desire genuine personal freedom. The bureaucracy sure doesn't provide genuine personal freedom: "Have you got a loicence for that machine gun?" "Have you got a loicence to go hiking?" "Have you got a loicence to remodel your bathroom?" "Have you got a loicence to build a shed on your own land with your own tools?" "Have you got a loicence to make your own retirement decisions?"
Agentic people, creative people, are absolutely stifled by the ever-present managerial state and hate it. I would legitimately prefer a Monarch whose name I know, to a thousand useless Karens in their office chairs whose names I'll never know, but who make my life a living hell of paperwork. Anyone who advocates "democracy" in the current day is actually advocating managerialism, and does so as a method of assuaging personal responsibility and agentic action. The height of laziness is to allow "public policy" to make your decisions for you.
I have written two full articles on why monarchy is superior: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/a-reasoned-case-for-monarchy-return?r=43z8s4 and https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/neo-monarchy-a-blueprint-for-liberty?r=43z8s4
but I can partially summarize below.
Democracy empowers self-centered tyrants to build little fiefdoms of bureaucratic assery. Unelected, unaccountable, because the complex systems of society are too complex to be run by a few hundred incompetent legislators. Sam Francis did a great book on this: "Leviathan and Its Enemies." The sole purpose of parliamentarians is to assuage personal responsibility by saying, "In the end, it's the voters responsible for these retarded laws we passed."
Monarchies have worked incredibly well. The UAE is one example; Thailand and Oman, and Bhutan are other examples. Monarchies (real monarchies) have actually been incredibly skillful at navigating the 21st century, while democracies have fallen flat.
Also: if you're confusing monarchy with dictatorship, you fundamentally misunderstand what a monarchy is. It isn't a dictatorship, the latter being a highly unstable product of an oligarchic system, while the former is a patrilinear system that's proven very stable for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years of consistent governance. Democracies encourage leaders to think ahead no more than 4 years. Dictatorships lengthen the time horizon to "until I'm assassinated or replaced." Monarchies lengthen the timeline to multi-generational thinking on the part of half-decent kings.
Birthright is a monarch's claim to rule. But a democracy's claim to rule? It's the same as a dictatorship: coercion, threats, and the forceful silencing of opposition (as we've seen with Donald Trump from 2016 to 2024). Monarchy is clearly better in terms of both human rights and quality of life in every instance where it's been affected in the 21st century.
Democracy has proven to be a mediocre system at best. It's been a disaster of an experiment. There's a reason why democracies average 300 years before they collapse. Because for a democracy, collapse isn't based on bad governorship, it's based on the quality of the governed people... Democracy is basically government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, and the people are retarded.
Copernican - are you a white male?
That question is a 100% retarded response to my post.
Facts are Facts. It's all in the interpretation.
Yesterday I listened to a BBC radio programme in which a scientist/doctor was explaining how theyve just discovered that the Shingles vaccination stops people getting DEMENTIA. He was talking in faux science terms using lots of words and phrases that sounded factual and precise but it was all my eye and Betty Martin.
Was this a program called 'Inside Health'?
Yes. That's it.
Thanks for replying so quickly. I assumed it was that program [https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002h9vq], so I immediately listened to the first half, which was the bit about Shingles/Dementia. I'd be interested to know why you came to that opinion ('faux science... all my eye and Betty Martin'), particularly considering the academic affiliations of the two main speakers (Stanford & Edinburgh universities respectively), and that the idea of possible links between Alzheimer's and inflammation/immune reactions is hardly new?
I guess money ceases to control the direction of research or the gloss on actual results if your degree is from Stanford et al. (as opposed to some prole tier State school). lol
Because I don't trust scientists,doctors,or any experts and I was slightly sceptical before covid. It is rubbish. They use long words and invented terms to dun us into believing in them or rather to dun the legislators into passing laws to control us.
Yes, but ... if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness. The world is very complicated; we're learning more about it every day. We can't know everything. We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course. Case in point -- if you don't trust your doctor's advice, you can get a second opinion -- from a doctor. Not a neighbor, not somebody on television. That would be the sort of madness that Ted is writing about.
“We have to trust experts” I have been let down by many experts in many different contexts throughout my 53 years on this planet. I think this is overly simplistic advice. We need a more complex approach that involves nurturing and listening to our own intuition as well as examining a situation from multiple angles: not just trusting a stranger who has a degree in something.
Yes. Intuition. Machines don’t have this. We don’t just know through the brain. The whole body is a receptor for truth.
"if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness."
On the contrary, one has every reason -- today, in the US, if not the West -- to be quite tentative, if not skeptical, of anyone one doesn't know, and of anything one doesn't know. For example, I don't know what kind of world you live in, but it is clearly insulated from some dangerous modern realities.
"We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course."
Modern life *forces* one to trust "experts", but that says nothing supporting their trustworthiness. You believe you have defined what is rational "up to a point", but one never knows the true limits. Sometimes these "experts" are self-declared and are narcissists; sometimes they did little beyond ferally climbing a ladder to power; sometimes they thoroughly corrupted by money and other life constraints, wittingly, or not ("It is difficult to get a man to understand [or claim] something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"); etc.
"We can't know everything."
Of course. Thus, a serious problem in the modern complex world, in which trust is very seriously and rapidly decaying.
"Experts" - what a Laugh nowadays ... try finding one
Lift up a stone.
I think any rational person can point to the last 5 years as a good reason to mistrust information sources.
Really ? Just try getting a 2cnd opinion in a timely fashion if you need one ... in this mediocre Medical time we live in. Yet another TV / Movie / Societal induced Myth
Only if you can pay. In the REAL WORLD not the THEORY world.
No we don't need to know about everything. That's the Satanic lie that started all this off way back in the old orchard.
Well said.👍
"[Being] open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people."
Exactly. Problem is, we *need* to outsource 99.99...+%, and most times several layers deep. Our incredibly complex world has been held together with trust, and now...
This is why God put innate instinct in us and why Satan (to use a short word to name the very real we now all realise entity of evil) tells us to ignore our "gut feeling" and base our decision on facts and logical reasoning. Facts change and logical reasoning based on facts can leave you up that proverbial creek,paddle less.
Your owners created "God", and, no, those owners don't love you. Psychopathy rules.
The Abrahamic God is, in the West, quite likely the Mother of All Psy-ops. That's where it seems the skills of controlling people, taking full advantage of a specific pre-civilization product of brain/mind evolution -- the hallucination of powerful invisible beings -- were honed to perfection, long before modern (psychological) science.
If not for the information revolutions of the printing press (and what the Enlightenment brought forth), and now of the internet, we likely would have long ago been formed far more completely into flesh robots. Instead, we have an imperfect version of that in modern capitalism. We have been "used" for hundreds of years of production, while they hold their noses and tell us how generous they have ben to us.
Soon, since almost all of us will soon completely be rendered useless eaters, they will have no reason even to let us live. You may have noticed, for example, in the US at least, that over the last five decades the necessities of medicine, education, housing, and now food have been rendered unaffordable. During the same period, the formerly independent major news media was gobbled up by bigger companies and transformed into entertainment +stealth Big Brother. Since this *five-decade long* slide wasn't simply a natural disaster or accident that caught everyone by surprise, it is clear they / "the system" have no interest in any correction.
You and Heisenberg.
Meh. Methinks you trust too much, and don't have a real feel for what the coming onslaught of "realish" media will mean.
I mean, look what Faux "Newz" has done. Now, multiple that by false information sources finely attuned to human behavioral tendencies.
Unless, as Ted suggests, we develop some sort of external notarization process, we fucked.
This will drive in person meetings and interaction. Integrity, honesty, and dependability will be coins of the realm.
I think you’re right. There is an emptiness to reducing everything to a merely virtual commodity or experience that can’t be verified as being genuine or valuable.
I am (among other things) a pet sitter and because I have a strong reputation in my community I’m able to pick and choose my clients. Long term clients are even willing to alter their travel plans if it means they can stick with me instead of taking a chance on someone new.
I’m seeing a disturbing new trend on Reddit of pet sitters being monitored (sometimes without being told up front) by cameras in the home. My clients have no desire to do so nor would I accept a gig from a client who wants to track my every move. “Trust me or don’t hire me” is my stance. I think we need to start setting healthy boundaries now about what we find acceptable and be ready to push back and not just accept this increasing level of intrusiveness as inevitable.
My husband is a musician and I think we will continue to value people like him who can get up in front of a crowd with only his skills and experience and entertain and delight people without them having to ask themselves what kind of trickery is at play.
He just played a live local concert at a local recording studio (with an in studio audience) that was part of an ongoing series of shows that get recorded and posted online. The person who introduced the band said that they only have on bands who write their own material and that they have recorded 253 of these shows over the past 5 years or so. This gives me hope.
There’s another series of concerts at a local park that are not promoted on social media. The idea is to just tell your friends and neighbors about it directly and meet up there and have a lovely organic offline experience. It’s usually very well attended and often has a kind of dreamy feel to it. We should be doing more of this. Grounding ourselves in reality to stave off the vertigo of so much trickery
Agreed. So much so, that I think widespread use of electronic communication (of *all kinds*) will "crash" in some not-too-distant future.
That's one big reason why I continue to live in a city, despite the well-known dangers.
I hope so
My dear God. William Godwin once conjectured that no one would ever choose an “experience machine” over reality. He was so very wrong. I’m going to go hug my dog now.
Hugging dogs may well be the answer to this.
Hugging the dog right now is an EXCELLENT idea. I shall join you and hug mine!
At first, I misread you to write that you were going to go HANG your dog now, which actually made sense gotterdammerungically.
I'm glad I misread you, but I think a lot of us have that instinct about ourselves and our lives these days.
How did we let things deteriorate to such a status? Why couldn't Congress legislate usefully, placing strong limits on the use of AI, demanding that users of it in media make clear that what the viewer is about to watch is AI derived, and how it is?
Whoever reads this, please don't tell me that such a thing would be fascistic and unconstitutional. Justice Robert Jackson was right when he noted of mad libertarian types that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
You all need to write to your Congressmen and Senators and remind them forcefully that THEY are YOUR SERVANTS and their job is to enable WHAT YOU WANT DONE. I tell my Brit MP that everytime I write,it used to be a her,now it's a him. I'm sure they love being reminded of their servitude.
https://cambron.substack.com/p/ai-truth-telling-and-the-return-of
I’ve thought about this too. I think AI will lead us back to a premodern need to depend on eyewitness accounts, and that this, in the very long run, could be good:
“Here is my basic thinking:
If we cannot distinguish true images and videos from AI-generated ones, we will have to dismiss all images and videos as sources of truth.
Apart from images and videos, all we have left in truth assessment is the eyewitness account.
Truth-telling, therefore, on a human level, will return to pre-technological standards and practices.”
…
I think that AI will help us rediscover what has been true all along, that discerning truth is inescapably tied to trusting in other human beings. Undoubtedly, this will also mean that lying will have much larger consequences socially. If you lie, as in ages past, you will be dismissed from society. The old proverb, your word is your bond, will become palpably true for the ordinary person as well as for the reporter, and we pray that it will be true also for the politician. I think we are seeing the beginning of this in the wholesale rejection of what was once called the mainstream media, which by the numbers should not be called mainstream anymore. If you are in the business of truth-telling, and you are for years caught in blatant lies, at some point the audience walks away.”
Could this bring a renaissance of the traditional newspaper? After all, professional journalism incorporates a process of verification.
I totally agree. And I think that the better grounded in reality that we already are, the easier this will be. And I'm not trying to be a brown-noser but I really think that is the best purpose of things like Ted's Humanities Reading List, to be fully grounded in reality.
The invasion of AI is challenging our ability to trust each other like no other invention in human history. AI is "haystacking truth", where accurate facts, honest reporting, and reasonable opinion, become harder to find as the haystack grows ever larger, filled with so much falsity and really, really good deepfake videos.
My husband and I recently wrote a piece "Welcome to the Analog Renaissance: The Future is Trust" that speaks to the issues Ted raises here:
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth, and away the ideal of meritocracy, of a meaningful connection between effort and achievement, and instead drift toward a “skeptocracy”, where we are chronically skeptical or suspicious of the success of others, doubting if their achievements are based on actual effort or talent."
We shared our thoughts on building outposts of human trust in the digital wilderness here: https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-analog-renaissance
LinkedIn demonstrates the skeptocracy in CorpWorld, every day.
" LinkedIn" - one of the earlier scourges of Humanity on the Digital / Social Media thing
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? "
Well, the Soviet-style nakedness of endemic lying ("reality creation") and two-class societies in the "democratic" West has been emerging to most of us for quite a while now. Certainly, the past two decades of creeping totalitarianism in national governments since 9/11 and GFC removed all doubts. So the TPTB's normalized orgy of mind-fuckery and bullhorn-hogging are now screaming towards a centrifugal crack-up. Stands to reason they can't get AI in place -- everywhere -- fast enough.
"There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth"
Loss of trust in asserted "truth" is well past the risk phase. We, those of us outside the chattering-classes bubble, have been grappling with the consequences, and that is the main reason "inexplicable" political eruptions have been occurring worldwide. I know, the establishment has been hard at work "making sense" of them, mainly it seems by asserting a mysterious decline in "rationality" in half the population from what prevailed in the mid-late 20th century. Maybe it's something in the water? Maybe the lot of us can be pillow-smothered away by AI, and no one will be the wiser? Not a chance.
"the ideal of meritocracy"
Meritocracy is not an ideal. It is simply a replacement of the previous set of value judgments on who-should-get-what, which as you know were once heavily tilted in specific directions by race, sex, class, etc. Its pretense is right there in the name itself, which really should instead be labeled something like "geniocracy" or the like. Do you believe we should agree that all the lazy dummies out there should live in squalor and terror, as they deserve it, due to their foolish choices in creating their brains, temperaments, parents, family/local culture, and finally, any failure in adulthood to "catch up"? Plus, as they're idiots, that they have no idea what they're missing anyway? Recognizing that there's a problem here doesn't specifically require Marxist solutions; it specifically requires actual democracy and human empathy to be driving the world, in place of the actual reigning supremacism and psychopathy.
The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst
Shock sell-off after study warns most investments in artificial intelligence get zero returns
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/20/ai-report-triggering-panic-and-fear-on-wall-street/
Likely.
"..another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality."
Idk about everybody else, but i feel like this happened for me a few years ago. All this online shit? Its just bullshit, its not real. People act like this is life, but this is not life. Life happens in the real world. This "checking out" to live online is exsctly how we ended up here, with a crazy ass president and people who dont know how to *talk*, let alone *do* anything.
And at first i thought maybe *i* was crazy. Bc hell, *everybodies* doing it, right? So it must be me, right? Nah, i learned long ago to get my truth for myself(which isnt to say i wont listen to people, and look for the truth in what they say. But i also look for results. Without results, its just more bs).
I remember a few years ago trying to participate in a discussion(or reddit lol) about equal rights for lgbtq(which, im for rights for everybody, i dont hate over shit like that), and they went in my profile and came back and told me i wasnt "allowed" to participate bc i am straight, white, and male. Well shit lol. That they were acting just like the people that hate them mattered not. What mattered was my skin color, my gender, and who i like to fuck.
My point in all that is thats when i saw this online world for the bs it really is. That shit had nothing to do with rights for people, it had to do with people giving themselves over to their most base emotional responses. I sure dont need that in my very real life.
I may have wandered off topic but, my point being, "shared reality" has already been stretched thin. I assume im being lied to, and enjoy the pleasant surprise when on occasion im not. And ill tell ya, that understanding has made *my* life much better.
So heres to anybody who has continued this whole time to "keep it real". They wont have any problems in this new world of bs. Only those who were silly enough to put their faith in the internet will struggle. But what did they expect, huh? Idk, blows my mind what people will do for the chance to drink the damn koolaid lol, like dont you know thats poison?
I agree with almost everything you wrote Ted. My only quibble is that we can not wait for politicians and businessmen to sound the alarm. Most of the politicians are owned by the mega-corporations. The mega business people are only interested in their bottom line not our well being.
Another thought provoking article.
What about publicly traded companies. Absent fraud, they still have to report their numbers in fairly great detail to the SEC and get third party verification by an accountant. Maybe that's a model that could be adopted. yes, we had Enron, WorldCom and others, but those were exceptions to the rule and those executives went to jail for a very long time.
P.S. I don't own and am not affiliated with an accounting firm so no self-interest in this.
We're never going to trust a "Trusted 3rd party" to verify anything again post-covid.
Never trusting any third party will lead to ignorance and self-harm. What about blood tests and other medical tests? Who will you trust for medical advice and feedback?
those were just the token scapegoats
I sincerely appreciate this article because it correctly identifies a very real set of consequences that modern technology -- especially generative artificial intelligence -- may impose on human civilization as we know it. These consequences were not unforeseen however . . .
I am currently employed, at 40+ hrs/week, on a team of thousands of human linguistics experts, located throughout the globe, as generative AI associates. Our role is to identify, correct, and prevent the falsehoods, hallucinations, inheret biases, and other misstatements of fact that are sometimes given by AI chatbots as responses to prompts requested by other humans. As you can imagine, this can be a very demanding occupation, but we are compensated quite handsomely for our work.
This job title has been around for approximately 4-5 years and, today, we are making large strides of progress in the right direction. We feel that, as more qualified workers enter this rapidly growing field, hopefully, with a little more time, we will be able to stave off the catastrophe you have so accurately predicted. Thanks for bringing much needed attention to this phenomenon. Keep publishing your insightful articles!
I wonder about this too. I spent an abnormal amount of time on ChatGPT between April and May this year and after witnessing Sora (image and video creation by prompts) I had a bit of a mental health dent. Things are no longer as they seem. I’m glad you wrote about it because how we respond to this will mean everything for the road ahead of us. I have been thinking how to live a life without internet and computers. I can still remember what that felt like. I used to spent hours reading printed books. I’ve not done that for ages.