Greetings Friends.
To those who have been inquiring, it should just be a few more days before the launch of our new AI product. I don’t want to give away any more specific details yet but trust I will do a full debrief once the beta is available. I’ve already described the basic outline HERE. If you are paying attention to AI at all, you know that the app space is rapidly filling up with an insane number of products that tap directly into OpenAI’s API. The gold rush, as I described in Apps and ZIRPS, was going to be over creating the interface of the AI, not the AI itself. This has played out with even more fervor than I had anticipated.
This week I want to give an overview of an ideology and ethos of an ecology that seems to be emergent. Information is flowing freely throughout the planet, and being printed fast enough to become the new global reserve currency. How we deal with that information becomes of utmost importance.
The Neo-Truth World
Paradigm shifts seem to come and go much more quickly than they did in the past, and it feels like we are on the precipice of a new breakthrough. 2007-2008 ushered in the iPhone and propelled Facebook to 100 million users. 2016-2020 ushered in a post-truth world. Mis and disinformation were rampantly escalating an existing divide between people. Society was not so much interested in truth as they were in confirmation bias. Major media outlets realized the most lucrative revenue model was to feed the dopamine addicted masses exactly what they wanted to hear. Did Trump or Hillary collude with the Russians? Both, if you believe everything you hear. “Truth isn’t truth”, as Rudy Giuliani famously proclaimed in 2018. How delightfully apt.
Now, people are waking up. Or at least everyone in my social circle seems to be saying the same thing: “I’m not political”. It’s not that people aren’t passionate about certain issues, or that being a moderate or centrist is becoming fashionable, it’s that people are becoming post-political, post-populist, post-post-truth.
As I wrote about in The Age of Authenticity way back in December 2021:
“The Age of Authenticity decrees that a person’s (or company’s) underlying beliefs (or product) must be inherently true to themselves in order to garner support (or investment). Too many things get pumped and dumped in the vein of immediate relevancy, enriching and empowering the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The stamp of authenticity is like a promise, like “we hold these truths to be self-evident”, that I am who I say I am, and in 10 years my fundamental values will not have changed, because the values I hold today are complex and calculated and nuanced enough that they are designed to stand the test of time. It is perfectly fine (and in fact admirable) to change your mind on issues, but things like integrity and compassion are not the sort of thing you waffle on. It’s not about “what does this mean for me now” it is about “what does this mean for us later”. It’s a simple change in the dynamic of the socio-economic valuation and power structure, but it is going to be fundamental, and pervasive, and macro.”
Being an individual is cool. To attach your identity to a big tent party post-2023 is an act of self-immolation of your individuality. If the period we are exiting is post-populist or post-truth, then we are entering a post-post-truth world, or as I like to think of it, a neo-truth world. This “new truth” seeks to find real empirical evidence about what is happening and does not want to censor the opinions from either side. The neo-truth world is all about ingesting as much information as possible and making your own decision as an individual. Being post-political, people are realizing that the 4-quadrant spectrum does not adequately represent the minutia of conflicting individual perspectives. Neo-truth is all about having a discussion, exploring together, learning, and changing your mind. This is why podcasts are skyrocketing in popularity. Having a discussion with a person from an opposite viewpoint is the quickest way to zero in on truth, as it either solidifies your own position, completely changes your mind, or branches off into a more nuanced stance.
Neo-truth is all about having a discussion, exploring together, learning, and changing your mind.
The work of Karl Popper is going to become much more relevant in the coming years, with pop-thought leaders such as Naval Ravikant, David Deutsch, and Nassim Taleb all co-signing his major ideas. Popper’s main contribution to philosophy is that all scientific theories should be falsifiable through empirical evidence. “Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification”. This idea might just become the guiding principle in the neo-truth world.
The most important thing in life is information. It always has been. DNA is literally just that. My pet theory on the world is that everything boils down to energy and education. I would now like to refine that. The more empirical version is that everything boils down to energy and information. Education is downstream, as it is the curation of information. The technology boom has always been about information, and we have more of it than ever before. We became so inundated with it so quickly, that we have not as a species had time to react. So we did what any ancient tribe would have done in the same situation, and hunker down into smaller groups for protection. It is dangerous to go against the tribe, as you getting exiled in prehistoric times would lead to certain death. Today, the same anxiety remains. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person and your livelihood is taken away.
In other words, as we were inundated with information, we did not care about truth, because we did not have the resources to define it. We defaulted to belonging, and whatever else would keep us in the tribe. In a neo-truth world, we will welcome this onslaught of information, because we are developing the tools to deal with them. Our collective bullshit detectors have gotten better, and we are no longer beholden to the opinions handed down to us by legacy media. As previously defined truths become un-truths at scale, we will all organically become mini-Poppers. No longer naïve to the vague and hand-wavy proclamation, we will be demanding of its falsifiability.
As previously defined truths become un-truths at scale, we will all organically become mini-Poppers. No longer naïve to the vague and hand-wavy proclamation, we will be demanding of its falsifiability.
This is good, because as the early adopters of AI tools know, the onslaught of information that we have experienced over the past couple of decades is going to pale in comparison to the preposterous volume of information that we are going to be hit with. Deep fake video, audio, still photo, text. Popular movies are being recreated with Seinfeld substituted for main characters with hilarious accuracy. Realistic Trump photos in jail are surfacing, fooling old ladies on Facebook. Anything you can imagine can be created now with generative AI, and with the power social media, distributed algorithmically across the universe.
Traditional media of course cannot stand idly by as both creative and production are as displaced their distribution has. Media (whether through centralized MSM, or the decentralized creator economy) has done a historically phenomenal job of monetizing influence. First it began with eyeballs, then site visits, then it went into followers, and eventually into more elaborate engagement and conversion metrics, but the overall goal was always revenue. So much so that now there is a whole economy based around creators and the influence that they generate. But when this type of tool is created in the universe, it is only a matter of time before it is used at scale. While influencers dabble around the fringes to amass influence, the mega media organizations take this to another level and use it to push the agenda of special interests and politics. If all media is paid solely off the backs of advertisers, the only question anyone should ever be asking of it is, what are they trying to sell me?
In a neo-truth world, the goal is to collaborate and accurately attribute instead of influence. Influence is a byproduct, not the objective of, a multi-touch attribution model. Who are the true influencers in society anyways? Most people are only parroting trends that they see in other places, and not true trend setters or idea generators themselves. The real influencers are many, many degrees of separation away from a public face.
When searching for truth, shouldn’t we want to know where the ideas originate from? Who is influencing the thought leaders? Who is your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper? If Greg Popovich learned to coach from Larry Brown, and Steve Kerr learned to coach from Greg Popovich, how much attribution do we give Larry Brown for Steve Kerr’s four championships as a coach?
Like I brought up in Infringement Binging, attribution will be a major part of AI. When a model is trained on a corpus of data and queried, or asked to generate a specific output, it spits out an answer that is a collection of bits and pieces of the information provided. Knowing the weighting of how much each source or touchpoint is attributed goes a long way in providing the proper credit when money is on the line. But for truth seekers, it goes a long way in getting to origin of a thought bubble. Opinions are usually based on understanding of facts, and, like influence, facts can be traced back to the source data. Finding falsifiable data deep in the branches of a tree can cut off a large swath of disinformation. Information and opinion without traces back to the source data will be like the ramblings of a madman. It would be inconceivable to apply credence to such a thing.
Information and opinion without traces back to the source data will be like the ramblings of a madman. It would be inconceivable to apply credence to such a thing.
What platform of the future will cater specifically to these truth seekers? Twitter is making a run at it but faces the headwinds of being an incumbent of the ruling class, and has a huge target it on its back. Seeking truth will likely need to be AI-native, and possibly Crypto-based, so as to leverage maximum knowledge while remaining confident in the chain of custody of information. It will attract a certain kind of person, an apolitical zealot who is uncompromising in their ability to compromise. Theories and hypotheses will be falsifiable in their suppositions, and participants will take great pride in confirming or denying them.
Information is only as good as its quality. Against an infinite tide of increasingly malicious attacks on the mind, humans will use their ingenuity to adapt, as they always have. Just because logic is fuzzy doesn’t mean you have to go with the percentages of the masses, especially if there are incentives at play. The post-truth world was about creating your own personal reality, tribalism, distrust, siloism, and echo-chambers. The neo-truth world is about community, collaboration, healthy contention, and confidence. As increasing entropy accelerates time forward, converging on collective consciousness will be “a priori” for the next phase of human evolution.
There are no more red pills and blue pills, only white pills and black.