I wonder what will happen, when we as humanity is forced to disbelieve everything we read online because it might be AI and not real. Can we trust that the media does not use AI sources and report scandals as truth? Right now, it is fairly easy to spot "AI content". That might not always be so.

In the end, might it be that we will only believe our own senses? Might we begin to talk to one another again face to face, because we cannot trust anything else? And what does such distrust towards the surrounding reality do with our trust in things like government, economies - all these invisible structures we have built around us?

AI might cause us to question reality radically. Such questioning might cause a reset of the human world, where we are forced to reconstruct it - build it better - because we have lost faith in it and see it clearly. What we do not question, becomes solid in our minds. So what does questioning do, except dissolve what used to be solid? Questioning capitalism causes the flaws to be exposed. Disbelief is like acid to the known.

But I don't know. I think I am not being dramatic here, it is a real possibility. What I have described above is an epistemic crisis. We might be moving from an era of "information scarcity" to an era of "trust scarcity.". When the cost of generating convincing lies drops to zero, the value of "truth" becomes astronomical.

Seems to me this is the value of the "Doubting Thomas". He dissolves the false into a new clarity, and becomes the patron saint of empirical knowledge. He is not rejecting truth, but insists that truth must now pass a higher bar. Touch, test and verify. He is the transition from faith-by-authority to knowledge-by-contact.

It is a strange thing, to hit the wall where "seeing" is no longer "knowing.". Is this image real? (No, it isn't. It is AI). The war is real, but this image? No not at all. And right now is as unrealistic as it is going to be. It will only get better. A man can sit in his basement and construct images, videos, news stories - and by doing so create an entirely fictional story that New Zealand has sunk in the sea which will seem quite believable.

Have you noticed distrust begin to creep into your life? I know I have. And the invisible structures? Governments, markets, money, law? These things already rely on trust rather than direct experience. When epistemic confidence weakens, those abstractions start to feel fictional also. Once that feeling sets in, their legitimacy begins to weaken. Trust is the real currency, not money. Money can not exist without trust.

This is not a warning. It is hope. The hope I express here is simply born from the recognition that the current systems do not serve us. The planet is being destroyed by them. Our societies are being fractured and destroyed by them. Our connections to each other are being destroyed by them. We value items over people, money over integrity. The systems we currently have are old, and have served their purpose. They must die. The demolition of trust is necessary for their demise.

On the other hand.. And this is a serious problem. The epistemic crisis is also the perfect conditions that would allow for near unlimited atrocities to occur without being checked and discovered. Real crimes, disappear in the noise. AI garbage could become the perfect camouflage.

But would not the high-trust that emerges in the local invariably emerge also in the global with time? The local is the fundament we build on, after all. But while there is neither local nor global trust, perhaps that is "the time of monsters". Antonio Gramsci once said: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.". We might be in that interregnum now, or find ourselves in it shortly.