The timing is catastrophic

AI is arriving in a world where institutional authority, shared truth, and information integrity have been systematically dismantled over two decades. We're building the most sophisticated cognitive technology in history on the most fractured trust landscape in modern memory.

“If you wanted to design the worst possible moment for AI to emerge, you might create a moment like this one.”

From post-truth to post-trust

A decade ago we worried about post-truth, where emotions overshadow facts. Now we face something deeper: post-trust, where we've lost the shared foundations for deciding what counts as a fact at all.

“Post-truth describes a distortion in how people weigh facts and feelings. Post-trust describes a deeper fracture: the loss of shared procedures for determining what is real.”

How trust collapsed

We moved from editors curating truth to anyone publishing anything. Algorithms optimized for clicks and outrage, not accuracy. Nearly 8 in 10 people get news from algorithmic systems they don't understand or trust.

Trust in institutions has evaporated

U.S. federal government trust fell from over 70% in the late 1950s to under 20% today. Fewer than one-third of Americans trust mass media. Confidence in religious institutions, finance, healthcare, and science has all eroded.

Deepfakes shattered visual evidence

For nearly two centuries, photographs were evidence. In early 2023, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket spread widely before people questioned it. Within two years, the question shifted from spotting fakes to trusting anything you see.

Our brains resist opposing views

Research shows exposure to opposing political views on social media increases polarization. False news spreads faster than trustworthy news. Our brains process confirming information through reward pathways and disconfirming information through negative emotion channels.

AI is fundamentally different

Past technologies extended human capabilities while remaining subordinate to human thought. AI breaks that pattern. It generates arguments, synthesizes information, makes recommendations, and produces creative work that feels like someone else's thoughts.

AI learns from a broken world

AI systems learn by predicting patterns in data, not by understanding truth. They're trained on news, social media, polarized debates, conspiracy theories, and misinformation from our post-trust world. They absorb our distortions alongside our knowledge.

“It absorbs not only our knowledge but our distortions. It learns not only our facts but also our conflicts about those facts.”

We're building cognitive infrastructure on quicksand

AI gives us answers we cannot easily audit, based on training data we cannot inspect, optimized for objectives we don't control. A new kind of cognitive infrastructure is emerging precisely when our social infrastructure for trust is under strain.