Truth has always been a difficult thing to retain for the general public. With institutions that held authority in specific fields being dismantled and *influenced* into distrust, it really seems we’ve passed any peak of public trust in specialists. Maybe social media has distorted my view, but one of the greatest losses in the last few decades is trust in experts with experience and education. At least that’s the case for the US.
The dark irony is that the peak of public trust in the sixties was also a time of incredibly opaque institutions doing lots of vile stuff, ranging from Latin American coups to the Tuskegee experiment. I see Vietnam and Watergate as the tipping point. After that came reforms like the Church Committee and the Freedom of Information Act. That was great at first, but now every conspiracy theorist can use that information to earn $55k a year on X making up stories about the elites.
Media and attention being what they are, we only hear about institutions when they screw up, ignoring the millions of daily tasks that happen without incident.
Correct, and also note that the Declaration of Helsinki outlining medical ethics came out in 1964! So it was an extremely black mark for the US that they continued to cover it up.
I guess I did live to see the world reject climate change (global warming) over two decades ago, so the respect for peer reviewed literature in the public eye has never been absolute in my lifetime.
I’d be curious to look at institution trust levels over time as it does seem the post WWII world leaned heavily on institutional trust. Thanks for the thoughts
im 45 and similar, it didnt make sense when i was a kid in the 80s and it never did. if you grew up poor or otherwise marginalized u never had rose colored glasses on. you couldnt afford them.
Yeah I don't want to minimize what Kyla is saying but there are still people fighting the war on terror, and others fighting the war on drugs. Right this minute! Nothing made sense during those periods and its just compounded, because those old culture wars don't die.
Holy crap, you've had quite the eventful week! I think its worth pausing to realize just how much modern life has thrust us into chaos as normalcy. Car accidents, building explosions, environmental disasters, etc. happening daily is a wild thing.
On the AI piece, Dror Poleg has been talking about AI remaining expensive. He says that the electricity and data demands for actual AI will mean we are not going to waste it on things humans can do. I think his stance puts some useful balance on Altman's vision.
Finally, on the more political / economic side of it all I've mostly come to the conclusion that this era is a more modern version of the Gilded Age. Opulence. Corruption. Extreme wealth inequality. New communications and transportation technologies. Populism.
Reform is coming (only pain gets a cure, and often times an erroneous cure that needs to be further cured through systemic reform). Trump is the erroneous cure, the shortcut that will not save us (shortcuts never do). It is his inevitable failure that will drive the reformative cure.
I feel like you should check out the Belle Epoque era from France. It was, retroactively, considered a golden age for France, and seems pertinent to our current moment.
It was considered a golden era when it came to art and tech innovation. It's interesting to see how people in the past lived their lives and that, against all odds, they all lived fulfilling and interesting lives. Hot take: a medieval peasant had a more fulfilling life than any of us right now.
I'd personally strongly hesitate to take one instance of Grok refusing a command as some sort of positive indicator that we are headed in the right direction, or that AI will somehow become smart enough to resolve the problems that it creates.
Otherwise, great article that articulates the tension between our frictionless online reality, and the one that actually matters (the one with real people in it). Using these systems' frictionlessness against themselves is great and I hope to see more of it.
With coordinated efforts I believe and hope that we can apply the same principal to things like AI - ie. intentionally feeding it such vast amounts of garbage data that it's rendered useless. For those unable to participate in physical resistance, this should be their focus area.
Figured it was just for fun, just wanted to share that thought in case anyone out there could take it the wrong way. Probably not necessary for your audience, but you never know hah
For me personally, I'm not much of a news guy. I read books. Just finished Middlemarch and I will start reading He Leadeth Me and Anna Karenina as part of my summer reading. He Leadeth Me, in particular, is going to be an important read. It's about a Jesuit priest being imprisoned by the Soviets post-WWII. If you dislike the modern world, it still beats being in a gulag in Soviet Russia. I think a lot of problems can be solved through a little bit of faith or believing in a higher power. That's my take anyway.
"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."
This is such a wise, beautiful and concerning essay. There is a great deal to ponder.
"The abundance of intelligence is being used to manufacture scarcity of truth"
I appreciate you more every time I read you. I am sorry that you are being frustrated in your immediate plans, but you used it to gain insight into how systems break down. Our continual task is to build, maintain and repair. Entropy would have it no other way.
Thanks for another thoughtful & thought-provoking column. My perception of the events you write about is that we are witnessing the invention of a new type of camouflage for various predators that have evolved in the digital world. As we learn to identify the camouflage, it becomes less effective. Unfortunately, we can't know about it until the predators use it to claim victims.
I think this gets at a very real and interesting problem. I think the way we form and deal with a collective reality has sort of been inverted. So it used to be
Objective Reality —> perception —> response to perception —> new reality
But now it’s
Perception —> response to perception —> new reality
It’s like there is disbelief in objective reality. Like it’s an extraneous consideration at best. If my social media feed shows me that there is an elite cabal eating children in the basement of a pizzeria, I am going to respond to that perception, which creates the same reality that would exist if that perception were true.
I think it’s the ultimate case of the tail wagging the dog.
Edit: I wrote about something adjacent to this. Check it out if you’re looking for a read.
One way is to talk about yang dominance and the depletion of yin.
Yang is expansive, moves fast (thoughts), exteroceptive and unresponsive by nature. Yin is contractive, moves slow (body/matter), interoceptive and responsive by nature.
When yang dominates as in this modern society, it becomes de-ranged and prone to express gross excesses of its nature. Yang by itself lacks internal reflection, empathy, and the capacity to respond. So, it "believes" what it "sees", but it can't really see anything because it has effectively cauterized its interoception. It thus projects & creates externally and perceptually its own repressed internal situation.
I’m not quite sure I’m grasping it frankly, but thank you for sharing that.
Maybe it’s related, but I have increasingly felt that nothing has deep roots, nothing feels genuine. And I find that even in the nature of people I meet. Empathy is expresses in a self centered and impulsive form, for instance. The beliefs people hold just don’t strike me as being something that goes down very far, and more becomes something they recite. Does that maybe get at it a little?
well, daoism basically says that beliefs/believing are unnecessary and a kind of a waste. what is true is often ineffable and sublime. and even back when the origins of daoism were beginning, the teachings were about how far people had strayed from what is essentially pre-nation state neolithic community.
it may be that this lack of feeling genuine is due to our modern socio-environment being so extremely far away from our genetic ecology.
That fits with a lot of attitudes that seem driven more by perception and narrative than reality, as well as people projecting their own mindset or fears on others. I like your use of de-ranged.
Altman: "a future where intelligence becomes “too cheap to meter,” where AI drives scientific breakthroughs, and we’ll swim in lakes and wealth inequality will disappear." What evidence is there that wealth inequality would magically disappear when the Gentle Singularity occurs? More likely the wealth will finally gather completely at a Singular top, and we just have to hope they will be gentle with us.
As long as humans are involved in the system of dividing and distributing the rewards of our technological gains, some people will receive a larger share than others.
Mr. Altman is not the first person to predict a utopian-like future based on the benefits of technology, but like everyone before him who made a similar projection, he will be wrong.
I understand why you used the image of the burning Waymos and the contradictions it implies. However, I feel like the media has hyper fixated on this image as evidence that LA is being torn apart. It is not. Most of the protests are peaceful. Most areas of the city are safe. Curfew was enacted in a 1-mile radius in a huge city. Let’s stop focusing on the bad actors and start highlighting the neighbors protesting injustice together, as a community.
I feel like I’m watching the collapse of the US in real time while most folks seem to be going on with their daily lives like all is normal. I recently turned 60, and have lived through a few things, but this is the first time in my life that I don’t know what to do.
Most of your life existed in the one time America tried to do it right (and let's say it's a low bar to surpass). Look up the Weekly Show (specifically the Jon Stewart and Jon Meacham episode) for a much more detailed explanation of what I mean but I will try to summarize:
The actual effort to live up to the supposed American ideals happened during the Civil Rights movement through to the 2010s. Trump (45) started the unwind. Biden failed to reform. Trump (47) is continuing the unwind. I hope whoever is 48 will be motivated to do systemic reform because of what happened under 47.
Thanks. I agree with that. I was born at the “right” time and have lived a relatively charmed life so far, which impairs my ability to cope with this current upheaval.
I’m not sure how true it is (it really felt like an Onion article) but the Daily Mail yesterday had a headline where there was a server outage at ChatGPT which had “users unable to write their emails.” If that’s not a microcosm of our present & future, I don’t know what is.
"We are increasingly caught between a future promised and the present we're living through."
The future promised and the future believe what will happen are completely different things. Even in a world where AI can deliver abundance, our current systems are not designed to deliver abundance evenly. Instead, they are likely to deliver abundance to the same recipients of abundance today - maybe even fewer recipients. Those who are surviving scarcity are, if anything, likely to face even more scarcity as their employment is taken away and they have little to no job prospects.
If we wanted to today, the US could choose to end or dramatically reduce poverty. We have deliberately chosen not to. So much about our elected officials, our laws and cultural views on distribution of wealth would have to fundamentally change in order to preserve the current experience as AI grows - who can honestly think that's going to happen at a fast enough pace to keep up with the advancement of AI, it's adoption, or the economic gains that come from said adoption?
Facebook just spent $15B to acquire 49% of an AI training company. The Middle East is investing billions upon billions to proliferate data centers. Countless investors are throwing money at AI. Are those investors going to be OK to cede their earned capital or will they use the systems in place today to make sure THEY earn the rewards at whatever cost to society writ large.
Let's stop acting like AI is nationalized. There is no future where AI benefits humanity remotely evenly across our species.
Yes but I think it’s worth reading Altman because he really is concerned that the technology will not be equally distributed. I also think that is a real risk that it won’t have equal benefits globally.
Your attention is not disassembled. Many people's attention is. How does the future of a culture look like where they are the majority? I said it before, Trump is not the root cause, but a symptom. And this is not restricted to the USA. They are just at the front of this development. Many old western countries are following.
It does fill me with optimism to see friends and acquaintances make intentional choices to escape the scroll and invest energy outside the outrage cycle. Perhaps with some time and intentional choices we’ll be able to break the feedback loop. Maybe AI will even be a positive influencer on that cycle.
Truth has always been a difficult thing to retain for the general public. With institutions that held authority in specific fields being dismantled and *influenced* into distrust, it really seems we’ve passed any peak of public trust in specialists. Maybe social media has distorted my view, but one of the greatest losses in the last few decades is trust in experts with experience and education. At least that’s the case for the US.
Definitely
The dark irony is that the peak of public trust in the sixties was also a time of incredibly opaque institutions doing lots of vile stuff, ranging from Latin American coups to the Tuskegee experiment. I see Vietnam and Watergate as the tipping point. After that came reforms like the Church Committee and the Freedom of Information Act. That was great at first, but now every conspiracy theorist can use that information to earn $55k a year on X making up stories about the elites.
Media and attention being what they are, we only hear about institutions when they screw up, ignoring the millions of daily tasks that happen without incident.
Just clarifying that the Tuskegee experiment began in 1932.
Good point. It didn't become public knowledge until the 1970s when whistleblowers felt more empowered.
Correct, and also note that the Declaration of Helsinki outlining medical ethics came out in 1964! So it was an extremely black mark for the US that they continued to cover it up.
I guess I did live to see the world reject climate change (global warming) over two decades ago, so the respect for peer reviewed literature in the public eye has never been absolute in my lifetime.
I’d be curious to look at institution trust levels over time as it does seem the post WWII world leaned heavily on institutional trust. Thanks for the thoughts
I hate to be the old man here, but I turned 40 recently and nothing has ever felt like it made sense.
Youngster!
Hah, depends on the day whether I feel like one!
im 45 and similar, it didnt make sense when i was a kid in the 80s and it never did. if you grew up poor or otherwise marginalized u never had rose colored glasses on. you couldnt afford them.
Yeah I don't want to minimize what Kyla is saying but there are still people fighting the war on terror, and others fighting the war on drugs. Right this minute! Nothing made sense during those periods and its just compounded, because those old culture wars don't die.
yes there's such a huge lack of responsiveness and interoception. generations of repressed people who can't adapt or even really be kind.
Holy crap, you've had quite the eventful week! I think its worth pausing to realize just how much modern life has thrust us into chaos as normalcy. Car accidents, building explosions, environmental disasters, etc. happening daily is a wild thing.
On the AI piece, Dror Poleg has been talking about AI remaining expensive. He says that the electricity and data demands for actual AI will mean we are not going to waste it on things humans can do. I think his stance puts some useful balance on Altman's vision.
Finally, on the more political / economic side of it all I've mostly come to the conclusion that this era is a more modern version of the Gilded Age. Opulence. Corruption. Extreme wealth inequality. New communications and transportation technologies. Populism.
Reform is coming (only pain gets a cure, and often times an erroneous cure that needs to be further cured through systemic reform). Trump is the erroneous cure, the shortcut that will not save us (shortcuts never do). It is his inevitable failure that will drive the reformative cure.
I am now stranded at the airport lol so it's really a rough week - but Dror is really interesting. And agree with all of those other points
I feel like you should check out the Belle Epoque era from France. It was, retroactively, considered a golden age for France, and seems pertinent to our current moment.
How so?
It was considered a golden era when it came to art and tech innovation. It's interesting to see how people in the past lived their lives and that, against all odds, they all lived fulfilling and interesting lives. Hot take: a medieval peasant had a more fulfilling life than any of us right now.
I'd personally strongly hesitate to take one instance of Grok refusing a command as some sort of positive indicator that we are headed in the right direction, or that AI will somehow become smart enough to resolve the problems that it creates.
Otherwise, great article that articulates the tension between our frictionless online reality, and the one that actually matters (the one with real people in it). Using these systems' frictionlessness against themselves is great and I hope to see more of it.
With coordinated efforts I believe and hope that we can apply the same principal to things like AI - ie. intentionally feeding it such vast amounts of garbage data that it's rendered useless. For those unable to participate in physical resistance, this should be their focus area.
yes, I just thought it was funny. the AI's dont even want to deal! thank you - agree re coordinated efforts
Figured it was just for fun, just wanted to share that thought in case anyone out there could take it the wrong way. Probably not necessary for your audience, but you never know hah
For me personally, I'm not much of a news guy. I read books. Just finished Middlemarch and I will start reading He Leadeth Me and Anna Karenina as part of my summer reading. He Leadeth Me, in particular, is going to be an important read. It's about a Jesuit priest being imprisoned by the Soviets post-WWII. If you dislike the modern world, it still beats being in a gulag in Soviet Russia. I think a lot of problems can be solved through a little bit of faith or believing in a higher power. That's my take anyway.
Reading it right now. Great book.
Related to a point I made:
"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
This is such a wise, beautiful and concerning essay. There is a great deal to ponder.
"The abundance of intelligence is being used to manufacture scarcity of truth"
I appreciate you more every time I read you. I am sorry that you are being frustrated in your immediate plans, but you used it to gain insight into how systems break down. Our continual task is to build, maintain and repair. Entropy would have it no other way.
Thanks for another thoughtful & thought-provoking column. My perception of the events you write about is that we are witnessing the invention of a new type of camouflage for various predators that have evolved in the digital world. As we learn to identify the camouflage, it becomes less effective. Unfortunately, we can't know about it until the predators use it to claim victims.
Good luck with the airline system!
I think this gets at a very real and interesting problem. I think the way we form and deal with a collective reality has sort of been inverted. So it used to be
Objective Reality —> perception —> response to perception —> new reality
But now it’s
Perception —> response to perception —> new reality
It’s like there is disbelief in objective reality. Like it’s an extraneous consideration at best. If my social media feed shows me that there is an elite cabal eating children in the basement of a pizzeria, I am going to respond to that perception, which creates the same reality that would exist if that perception were true.
I think it’s the ultimate case of the tail wagging the dog.
Edit: I wrote about something adjacent to this. Check it out if you’re looking for a read.
https://open.substack.com/pub/02tenon/p/the-imperialism-of-scientific-thinking?r=2vhi4v&utm_medium=ios
i practice (non-religious) daoism and they very clearly outline why and how this stuff happens. i like the way youve described it here too.
Thank you. I have a similar relationship with Buddhism.
What does Daoism say about this?
One way is to talk about yang dominance and the depletion of yin.
Yang is expansive, moves fast (thoughts), exteroceptive and unresponsive by nature. Yin is contractive, moves slow (body/matter), interoceptive and responsive by nature.
When yang dominates as in this modern society, it becomes de-ranged and prone to express gross excesses of its nature. Yang by itself lacks internal reflection, empathy, and the capacity to respond. So, it "believes" what it "sees", but it can't really see anything because it has effectively cauterized its interoception. It thus projects & creates externally and perceptually its own repressed internal situation.
Something like that.
I’m not quite sure I’m grasping it frankly, but thank you for sharing that.
Maybe it’s related, but I have increasingly felt that nothing has deep roots, nothing feels genuine. And I find that even in the nature of people I meet. Empathy is expresses in a self centered and impulsive form, for instance. The beliefs people hold just don’t strike me as being something that goes down very far, and more becomes something they recite. Does that maybe get at it a little?
well, daoism basically says that beliefs/believing are unnecessary and a kind of a waste. what is true is often ineffable and sublime. and even back when the origins of daoism were beginning, the teachings were about how far people had strayed from what is essentially pre-nation state neolithic community.
it may be that this lack of feeling genuine is due to our modern socio-environment being so extremely far away from our genetic ecology.
That fits with a lot of attitudes that seem driven more by perception and narrative than reality, as well as people projecting their own mindset or fears on others. I like your use of de-ranged.
Altman: "a future where intelligence becomes “too cheap to meter,” where AI drives scientific breakthroughs, and we’ll swim in lakes and wealth inequality will disappear." What evidence is there that wealth inequality would magically disappear when the Gentle Singularity occurs? More likely the wealth will finally gather completely at a Singular top, and we just have to hope they will be gentle with us.
it will not, I was being VERY sarcastic
As long as humans are involved in the system of dividing and distributing the rewards of our technological gains, some people will receive a larger share than others.
Mr. Altman is not the first person to predict a utopian-like future based on the benefits of technology, but like everyone before him who made a similar projection, he will be wrong.
I understand why you used the image of the burning Waymos and the contradictions it implies. However, I feel like the media has hyper fixated on this image as evidence that LA is being torn apart. It is not. Most of the protests are peaceful. Most areas of the city are safe. Curfew was enacted in a 1-mile radius in a huge city. Let’s stop focusing on the bad actors and start highlighting the neighbors protesting injustice together, as a community.
I feel like I’m watching the collapse of the US in real time while most folks seem to be going on with their daily lives like all is normal. I recently turned 60, and have lived through a few things, but this is the first time in my life that I don’t know what to do.
Most of your life existed in the one time America tried to do it right (and let's say it's a low bar to surpass). Look up the Weekly Show (specifically the Jon Stewart and Jon Meacham episode) for a much more detailed explanation of what I mean but I will try to summarize:
The actual effort to live up to the supposed American ideals happened during the Civil Rights movement through to the 2010s. Trump (45) started the unwind. Biden failed to reform. Trump (47) is continuing the unwind. I hope whoever is 48 will be motivated to do systemic reform because of what happened under 47.
You’re absolutely living in the Altman bubble. Good luck, you’re going to need it
Thanks. I agree with that. I was born at the “right” time and have lived a relatively charmed life so far, which impairs my ability to cope with this current upheaval.
I’m not sure how true it is (it really felt like an Onion article) but the Daily Mail yesterday had a headline where there was a server outage at ChatGPT which had “users unable to write their emails.” If that’s not a microcosm of our present & future, I don’t know what is.
wow, that's concerning
Wasting AI on writing emails is like having a car but keeping it in the parking lot 90% of the time... Oh wait.
Exactly. One of many unintended consequences.
"We are increasingly caught between a future promised and the present we're living through."
The future promised and the future believe what will happen are completely different things. Even in a world where AI can deliver abundance, our current systems are not designed to deliver abundance evenly. Instead, they are likely to deliver abundance to the same recipients of abundance today - maybe even fewer recipients. Those who are surviving scarcity are, if anything, likely to face even more scarcity as their employment is taken away and they have little to no job prospects.
If we wanted to today, the US could choose to end or dramatically reduce poverty. We have deliberately chosen not to. So much about our elected officials, our laws and cultural views on distribution of wealth would have to fundamentally change in order to preserve the current experience as AI grows - who can honestly think that's going to happen at a fast enough pace to keep up with the advancement of AI, it's adoption, or the economic gains that come from said adoption?
Facebook just spent $15B to acquire 49% of an AI training company. The Middle East is investing billions upon billions to proliferate data centers. Countless investors are throwing money at AI. Are those investors going to be OK to cede their earned capital or will they use the systems in place today to make sure THEY earn the rewards at whatever cost to society writ large.
Let's stop acting like AI is nationalized. There is no future where AI benefits humanity remotely evenly across our species.
Yes but I think it’s worth reading Altman because he really is concerned that the technology will not be equally distributed. I also think that is a real risk that it won’t have equal benefits globally.
Your attention is not disassembled. Many people's attention is. How does the future of a culture look like where they are the majority? I said it before, Trump is not the root cause, but a symptom. And this is not restricted to the USA. They are just at the front of this development. Many old western countries are following.
It does fill me with optimism to see friends and acquaintances make intentional choices to escape the scroll and invest energy outside the outrage cycle. Perhaps with some time and intentional choices we’ll be able to break the feedback loop. Maybe AI will even be a positive influencer on that cycle.