Back in 1970 when I was in grad school at Berkeley, I observed that it was categorically impossible for any single human to read and digest every issue of Physical Review Letters as it came out, much less stay up to date on all the Physics journals. That was just one rather isolated discipline. And the number of new publications per year was doubling every decade or so, even before the Internet. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate that trend.

Now it’s categorically impossible to stay up to date on any given topic, no matter how narrow, unless you are the only person thinking about it. So we are forced to pick “trusted sources” and… well… trust them. This of course makes us vulnerable to liars and cheats. Few have the discriminatory skills to choose whom to trust based on veracity; most make that choice based on pure confirmation bias.

The consequences are obvious.

Personally, I’m hoping that the AIs become AGIs ASAP so that we might have some competent help calling BS on the liars. Of course, the AGIs also might become tools of liars, in which case H. sap. will have to be renamed.

Note: this is not our fault in any moral sense. We have never had the intelligence, disposition or time to avoid this catastrophe; it was inevitable as soon as we invented “civilization”.

(01 May 2023)