(please god let me finish this one...)
And here's the problem with unity in 2026, Israel or anywhere else: every consensus is falsely earned.----------------------------
In a world where humans are no longer the most intelligent species on earth and thinking is farmed out, division is the natural state of the world because we don't know who's done the thinking, and we can't even trust that our sources aren't programmed to lie.
Thinking as we've understood it since the late 18th century is over. The centuries of reason may have run their course, and if all that is true, so then are the circumstances that created and maintained democracy.
To all those who hate AI, to all those who complain endlessly about slop, I will aggravate you in a way you probably didn't see coming:
AI is the best thing that ever happened to humanity.
Provided it doesn't come to life and kill us all, it is exactly the worldwide blessing we need.
Its programmers are not exactly known for altruism, but for the moment, we are saved by the fact that AI's business model forces the content to be as factual. Compare that to social media: social media rewards engagement, and few things engage on social media like factual inaccuracy. During this moment in history when social media has ruined the abilities of whole societies to think critically and believe the truth, AI is a stunningly effective corrective to the conspiracy theories we all see on Facebook, Twitter/x and Sextpanther. People fault AI for getting thousands of facts wrong, and they're absolutely correct, but tell ChatGPT that vaccines cause autism or that Trump won the 2020 Presidential election and see what it says.
Chomsky wasn't wrong about manufactured consent, he was just wrong about which era.
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Its programmers are not exactly known for altruism, but for the moment, we are saved by the fact that AI's business model forces the content to be as factual. Compare that to social media: social media rewards engagement, and few things engage on social media like factual inaccuracy. During this moment in history when social media has ruined the abilities of whole societies to think critically and believe the truth, AI is a stunningly effective corrective to the conspiracy theories we all see on Facebook, Twitter/x and Sextpanther. People fault AI for getting thousands of facts wrong, and they're absolutely correct, but tell ChatGPT that vaccines cause autism or that Trump won the 2020 Presidential election and see what it says.
I don't use AI to write my essays (I can't believe I have to write that), but I have AI review it after I write virtually every paragraph. And even if I say AI didn't write my essays, the time may come that you never trust again, dear reader, that my content is self-generated. Human content becomes no different from the content we generate, and in 1000 years, can we even be sure that the Bible as we read it today will be the authentic one and an AI generated one becomes the generally accepted Bible in which Yahweh was a visible being and Jesus is a Jewish god?
But the moment is coming, we know not when or how, when the business model changes, and AI can rewrite politics and history and philosophy in real time, even science: not one tweet at a time, but a worldwide wipe of the truth, and even those of us who remember the truth will begin doubting whatever truth we knew.
But even as AI can be used to correct democracy, it's too late. In the age of AI, I don't know how community trust is possible, precisely because people doubt the authenticity of everybody else's claims. In an age when all community trust can only be false, consent can only be manufactured by coercion. Truth probably can't run the world anymore, trust probably can't run the world anymore, not even AI can run the world. In such an era, only order can run the world, and however good a resource AI is, the very fact of its existence can eventually turn it into the worst version of itself that is programmed by its supervisors to tell lies and rewrite history on nearly every internet site in existence.
But the moment is coming, we know not when or how, when the business model changes, and AI can rewrite politics and history and philosophy in real time, even science: not one tweet at a time, but a worldwide wipe of the truth, and even those of us who remember the truth will begin doubting whatever truth we knew.
But even as AI can be used to correct democracy, it's too late. In the age of AI, I don't know how community trust is possible, precisely because people doubt the authenticity of everybody else's claims. In an age when all community trust can only be false, consent can only be manufactured by coercion. Truth probably can't run the world anymore, trust probably can't run the world anymore, not even AI can run the world. In such an era, only order can run the world, and however good a resource AI is, the very fact of its existence can eventually turn it into the worst version of itself that is programmed by its supervisors to tell lies and rewrite history on nearly every internet site in existence.
If we find a way to make people trust AI, the future is likely democracy. If societies find no way to broadly trust it, the future is likely dictatorship.
The 20th century belonged to democracies like America, the early 21st century belonged to Western Europe, the real 21st century probably belongs to dictatorships like China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, quite possibly India and quite possibly Israel.
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So if AI isn't going to be used by people to clarify the truth, AI will be used to obscure it: maybe even erase it.
Chomsky wasn't wrong about manufactured consent, he was just wrong about which era.
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