AI Arrived at the Worst Possible Moment

AI is not arriving in a world capable of receiving it. 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.From post-truth to post-trustA 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....