Instead, it is coming into a world that has spent the last two decades systematically dismantling the very foundations that would allow us to deploy such a powerful technology responsibly. Institutional authority, shared truth, and information integrity have been battered. We are building the most sophisticated cognitive technology in human history atop 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. A decade ago, we worried about living in a “post-truth” world. Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as its Word of the Year in 2016, defining it as circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
Post-truth describes a world where facts still exist but are often overshadowed by emotional narratives. What we are experiencing now goes deeper. I call this the “post-trust era:” a world where the very mechanisms that allow us to establish trust have broken down.
It is not just that emotions sometimes trump facts. It is that we have lost shared foundations for deciding what counts as a fact in the first place. Look at what has happened to our information ecosystem over the past two decades.
We moved from a world in which truth was curated by editors, printed by presses, and distributed by a small number of recognizable intermediaries, to a world in which anyone can publish, amplify, distort, or fabricate. Data exploded, and social media fragmented audiences. Algorithms began optimizing for clicks, engagement, and sensationalism.
The incentives shifted from accuracy to attention: virality over veracity, outrage over nuance, speed over scrutiny. The numbers tell their own story. Nearly 8 in 10 people get directed to their news primarily through algorithmic systems such as social feeds, search engines, and aggregators, effectively outsourcing their information diet to systems they neither understand nor fully trust.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
