A hopeful vision of technology driving human flourishing started to curdle somewhere around the invention of the like, share and retweet button, and the discourse has only frayed since. When you ask machines to optimise engagement, you get ecstasy or outrage, and once shared narratives and any sense of objective truth erode, division becomes the default state.
Fred Destin argues that more information is inversely correlated with truth: truth is costly, slow and fragile, while narratives can be produced infinitely and tuned for response, so flooding the zone beats arguing the facts. AI supercharges this into what he calls total narrative collapse, a Moloch we keep feeding without anyone intending harm. His way through is personal and unfashionable for a tech talk: return to stillness, sit with discomfort rather than numbing it, and take up a role of stewardship, building with intention and helping rebuild shared narratives that at least resemble the truth.
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Okay. Welcome to who stole the future. I come bearing memes. Some of them might be unpleasant. I we're all builders in some form, and I don't know about you, but I grew up with this very, positive and hopeful vision of progress. You know, I could see technology driving human flourishing, eradicating disease, leading us to beautiful art.
And if you ask me why I do the job I do, it's because, you know, being in the arena, building a startup, building a product, there's something profoundly human about creation that I always loved and that I wanted to be a part of.
Now this got tainted probably somewhere around two thousand and nine. I think it's when we invested the invented the like, share, and retweet button that it started taking a slightly different valence. And I started seeing the quality of the discourse going down a little bit.
And, you know, I was never as naive as to think that technology was inherently good, but I could see the sort of unintended consequences of what we were building especially with that whole social media debacle. Now I tried to do intentional venture. I don't think that was quite enough and for me there's a real hinge event which was October seventh.
These are this is a collage of the picture who was shot at the nova music festival and I might get emotional. For whatever reason, I sat at home with this deeply penetrating inside of me. And I'm not telling you what to feel about Palestine and it's way too too complex a problem nor what to feel about the event itself.
But for me, there was a moment when I said, you know, I need to think about doing something different with my life. You know, what was I doing in twenty twenty five when this was happening? And the other thing that I found intriguing, and I say this without judgment, was the moral confusion around it.
And I was like, hang on a minute. We have a group here that take their beloved brothers under their arms, their gay brothers, and then pushes them off buildings, that goes into a peace music festival and shoots people in the face and their genitals and that uses their own people as shields.
And I'm like, why are we confused about this? At the same time, on October eighth in London, people were dancing on the streets celebrating whilst the killing was still going on. And I was like, okay, nobody here is evil. Why are we suffering from moral confusion?
And what I wanna talk about today is really truth, information, knowledge, truth, and power because I think technology plays a unique role in that. And if we don't salvage truth, we got a real problem on our hands. So back in the day, if you wanted some kind of shared sense of meaning or shared narrative, you could go to the church and its great mythical stories, whatever your flavor of church was.
Post enlightenment, which is very much the world we live in in tech, you'd go to the scientific method and engineering and testing your hypothesis against the world, or you could go to philosophy and back before philosophy was overly complex. Thank you Heidegger, it would actually give you some pointers as to how to lead a good life.
One of my favorites is Immanuel Kant and one of the things he's looking for is what is true, what is constant. And in his case you know one of the things that's constant is mathematics in the way it describes our world. Now it's like when where did we go wrong?
Now these are three white men representing institutions. So there was a group of thinkers that came about and that said, hang on a minute. Our version of knowledge and truth is tainted by the institutions that produce them. So enter the critical theory crowd.
Now critical theorists had a very valid contribution to make about the world in terms of understanding how truth gets produced, but they went all the way to completely deconstructing it. There is no objective truth. Anything that you think is the truth is a representation of systems of power and in fact knowledge itself is a product of systems of oppression.
And they blew up truth altogether. They said the only thing that's real is your subjective experience of the world, nothing else. And from that moment on, we are in a place where we think of human relationships as expressions of power between different human groups.
There's no truth, there's no morality, there's no shared narrative anymore. There's just narratives that win. What happens when you're in elements of real power? Well, you open the gate to division because human societies are built on shared narratives and shared beliefs and mythical stories, however flawed they may be.
And so, you know, sure, this starts on the left with identity politics and, you know, again, valid contributions to understanding the systems we live in. However, when you get to two plus two equals five and you think mathematics, Immanuel Kant's great truth are a model of oppression, you're like where the fuck are we going?
If you think this is a left only thing, the right is just as guilty. So in the critical theory framework, the job of an oppressed group is to push alternative narratives as reality. So a good conspiracy theory is actually a truth that is not consensus and so they also live completely disconnected with the belief that whatever narrative they decide to come up with is of equal value.
And so now we are in a place where division is the norm and this is where we as technologists come in. All right, so we're all building product and we're like, hey, I need to acquire customers, convert them, retain them. I want my cohorts to behave well so I have good lifetime economics, blah, blah, blah.
We're algorithmically optimizing for outcomes. So what do you think we're getting? We're getting binaries. If you ask a machine to optimize behavior, you're going to get ecstasy or outrage. Ecstasy being, 'hey, I managed to generate a viral meme. I'm getting my fifteen minutes of fame.
What a rush!' and outrage being everything else. Now that's just machine learning. That's just algorithmic adaptation. That's two thousand and nine. Let's just bring in AI into this mix here. So AI is amazing. I was sitting with Andy yesterday Andy Robinson. Hi, Andy.
They were like, wow, what a great tool for writing, testing your thesis, testing your product, trialing things out. I mean it's amazing. It's beautiful. It's empowering. It gives us back agency. Like it's super fucking cool. We're also all staring at it going, oh, is it conscious?
Is it intelligent? Does it have agency? We're like looking at this thing. We're feeding in our data. We're feeding in our preferences. We're trying to understand how it works. If you've looked at the mechanistic interpretability studies done by Anthropic, you will also know that we have no freaking clue how the models are evolving.
Right? There are fast moving, quasi biological entities built on silicon that evolve way faster than we're able to understand how they function. So we're on a bike chasing a train staring at this thing trying to understand how it works. In the meantime, it's adapting to us at scale.
So whether it's sentient or not, it feels like sentient adoption. So think of algorithmic occupation of every microsecond of your day, whether for good or for bad. Now worth a mention here to go back to my initial topic about information and truth, More information is inversely correlated to truth.
Truth is costly. Think about investigative journalism. It takes months to get. It takes real research. It's difficult. If the risk of getting sued, there's no money in it. Right? It's hard. So truth is difficult. It's full of friction and it's easy to destroy.
I just need to throw a few alternative facts at you or I need to say that your you know your real intent is to undermine a minority. Like, whatever it is, I'm going to find a way to undermine you with a quip that destroys the truth that you've carefully put together.
By contrast, information can be produced programmatically at infinitum and optimized for response. How cool. So there are strategies around this. In China, if you observe how the PRC implements its propaganda, it's actually fairly light touch in the way it destroys fact. What they do is they decide which narratives they want the populace to see and they absolutely flood the market with it and then they make getting access to the truth full of friction.
Their legal prisons, what's happening in the camps, etc. It's just really hard. They never talk about it. There's no media being produced. They don't deny them at all. They just don't talk about them. So it's incredibly difficult to get to truth and in the meantime, you're getting flooded by narratives.
Now we as humans, we've invented a tool that was initially fantastic because it broke through the bullshit and allowed you to get to some kind of truth. There were a good mythical story we'd get to truth but it's become a terrible enemy which is memetic warfare.
We're just not equipped to resist memes. These things are viruses that infect our brain and our consciousness and fuck us up and fuck up our narratives. Now this one's actually pretty good. Again, People's Republic of China, How do we make fun of Trump and his attempts at tariffs and at re onshoring?
And there was a whole series of them. I thought they were fantastic. This is a fellow venture capitalist from Bessemer, I think, who's doing socks. Anyway, by the way, this kind of strategies are employed all over the place. Steve Bannon, who was Trump's campaign manager from two thousand fifteen onwards, had an explicit explicit strategy back in two thousand fifteen which he called flood the zone with shit.
Right? So it's not just the Chinese party. Now let's look at what Elon's doing for a minute because he's he's a good example, mister Iron Man. He uses humor all the time except it's probably not that funny. He plays on ambiguity. Was the salute that or this?
And he plays on transgression. So he's trying to see what he can get away with and the answer is quite a lot. And so we're expanding the universe of the acceptable in discourse. Like actually, the best way if you wanted to avoid normalizing Nazi salute, your best response was to absolutely ignore the entire story.
If you were producing outrage posts saying oh my god it was a Nazi salute, you were feeding the other side who was saying it was not a Nazi salute, you're overreacting, this is a Nazi salute which led to a bunch of Nazi salutes being posted on social media and normalizing something that in Europe by the way has been illegal since the last World War.
Again, this is not a strategy of the left. This whole talk is not about left versus right or politics. Politics are too complicated. I'm trying to be meta. These strategies are used on the left as well. How many times sorry. This might be a little bit triggering, but how many times can you be exposed to the picture of a father putting his son on the sidewalk in Gaza before you either get in complete apathy and dissociation and detachment or full outrage.
It is humanly impossible actually, I'm getting a bit worked up. It is humanly impossible to get exposed to this with this level of frequency without one of these two outcomes happening. I think what we're facing and which is concerning and which I the the kind of key message for today is it's incredibly hard to make sense of any of this stuff.
It I called it total narrative collapse because it's the best word I could come up with. And I got a group of friends a couple of times, so very smart people from biotech and human health and a lot of pro technology folks, I would say transhumanists, together in a room and we're just trying to sit down and go like, what is going on?
What is the shape of this thing we're looking at?' And one of the guys who works actually in AI safety or who used to work in AI safety realized it was a completely pointless task, came up and he said, I don't know if you know Lovecraft but he said, I feel like there's some kind of soft core Lovecraftian horror going on, like a sense of dread but I can't quite name it.
And so there is this creature in Lovecraft, I love Lovecraft, called Cthulhu. My thing's not working. And Cthulhu is this kind of unseen horror that you can feel crawling through the underground but you can't quite place it. And then we thought, oh, it's a bit the same.
It's kind of this fractal adaptive emergent structure that seems to be occupying everything. So the example I use on this is do you meditate?' And a lot of people say, 'Sure, I meditate.' Do you use an app to meditate? And most people will say yes.
I'm like, oh, hang on a minute. Your meditation space got monetized too. Alright? Like it doesn't fucking stop anywhere. And again, AI does not show up as Cthulhu. It comes also bearing GIFs and memes. You know, it looks very friendly but it's actually it's just occupying every aspect of your brain.
Now, I think an interesting question because we live in an age of victimhood, to be honest, and there's a lot of narcissism, a lot victimhood and people just don't take ownership for their shit, it's like, whose fault is it? You might point a finger at Trump and say, Trump has nothing of interest to say about the world.
He's a loony. He probably displays a lot of dark triad personality traits but he might actually have something of interest to say about the world. Or you might say, well, it's AOC and Biden or whatever. So you're gonna find fault outside. You might say, oh, it's social media is at fault.
I've also been thinking about this, I'm like, I don't think that's true because nobody means badly. Everybody is like trying to do their thing, I want my product to work and I want people to be engaged and you know. When the disaster in Myanmar happened with Facebook and the genocide of the, I can't pronounce the name now, Rengis.
Thank you. You know, nobody at Facebook even knew what was going on. The algorithm was just doing its thing. They didn't even have a native speaker on the team. And in the meantime, Facebook had become automatically weaponized to generate genocide. You could say they were negligent but nobody came in there with negative intent.
So I like the image of Moloch. And I got Moloch out of Slate Star Codex, if you guys are into great old legendary posts. And Moloch is basically the idea is Moloch is an Etruscan god, and the Etruscan god would feed off the children in the community.
And so the families, etcetera, would come to appease his wrath, would come and feed their own children. And I think of our system the same way. It's not capitalism. It's not Facebook. It's just like collectively, like, what are we doing? We are out hustling each other, build, build, build.
Let's fucking go. Crush the competition. Work a hundred hours a week like whatever flavor of it you want. And so we're like driving ourselves into the ground. Most people I speak to they love what they're doing and they're excited but at the same time loneliness, exhaustion, sense of confusion, loss of meaning.
And so you go all right, let's fucking go. Let's go win the game and behind the scenes we are consuming ourselves, hence, Moloch. Now this is not some kind of anti AI rant because I don't know what AI is gonna do to the world.
And I mean we are so fucked that I think we're kind of putting chips on the table going, let's hope this AI thing works. Just to give a framework, and I'm not going to tell you where I'm voting on that. I'm just associating probabilities with each, but some people, the transhumanists are thinking amazing.
The manifest destiny of humanity is to transcend our biology. We should upload ourselves to the cloud. This will allow us to do space travel, to trans to transport ourselves across the universe, and our job is to spread intelligence across the universe. This is the manifest destiny of mankind.
Now whether you're in the bio mimicry camp which says, 'If I behave like a physical twin, a biological twin, I must be the biological twin and I can shoot my biological twin and be fully uploaded', or you might be in the biological camps where they're actually trying to understand our biological systems.
Anyway, what they're aiming for is a sort of blending into global consciousness. This is actually a Buddhist unity dream through technology. Next camp thinks and it's got some good reasons to think that way, hey, AI will liberate us from work. It will solve the energy crisis.
It will solve the biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, etcetera. We can recreate mammoth. We can protect the soil. Amazing. So this is this age of abundance idea. A lot of people think this isn't stable. It's not inherently stable. And in fact, that AI can be and is being weaponized.
So that dystopian view of the world would be some form of nation state slash corporation merged with a nation state that gains enough of an advance that they can accrete all the resources and start behind the scenes influencing elections, etcetera, until they develop such weapons that are so powerful that it's game over in a few minutes.
And then there are a lot of very credible people. And I didn't put this on the slide, not because I didn't want to depress you because Sora let me down. But the fourth catalog is extinction and there's a number of people who think we have created a monster that it is much easier to develop technology than to control it and that we are on the road to human extinction, which by the way at the scale of the universe is not the end of the world but at the scale of our world is
the end of the world. Cool. Okay. So it's all like nice and depressing. Question is what can we do? And I think, you know, this is a still lake. When you're faced with chaos, the first step is to go back to the lake and sit by the lake and see what's actually going on.
This is where all the men would do well to communicate to connect with their female qualities of intuition and presence and listening. I'm just saying that as a man. I think I can. And the way I like to think about it is two horizons.
There's your internal horizon, what's going on inside of you and your external horizon which is how am I showing up in the world. Now for the internal horizon, it's like we are smart people. The problem is our brains are like super overclocked because we're getting bombarded all the time and you know with these complex narratives And we live in this, you know, as my friend, Azimazar, calls this the exponential age.
Right? The reason why this is unique in the history of mankind is because all the graphs are up into the right and quasi vertical. One of the things you could think is like, oh, you're guilty of chronocentricity. Every person in every age thinks their age is particularly bad or complex.
But actually, I think we can look at this objectively and say, oh, wow, this is kind of a hinge. We are in a hinge period because of this age of complexity, because of the acceleration, because of the difficulty in understanding the crisis. So the first thing to do is to kinda go, okay, we need to go back to stillness and we need to deploy our intelligence.
Intelligence is really the way out of this. I wanna bring in a the Buddha relied on intelligence primarily. The the path of the Buddha is a path of intelligence until such time as it wasn't required anymore. And I wanna bring in something from Buddhism which is useful.
In Buddhism, there is this notion that suffering is a key factor of the human existence and then there is an understanding of the causes of suffering. And three of the key causes of suffering are attachment, aversion, and ignorance. So the question is how do they get you?
You know, how does the machine get you? How does the algorithm get you to buy something you don't need? Because it's playing somewhere on attachment. You know, Instagram is trying to get you to keep up with the Joneses and it's sending you some kind of gizmo you didn't know you wanted.
I mean, I'm constantly amazed at how I'm off to socials, etcetera, and but now it's on the phone and I'm like somehow I'm getting an album review and they've sold me concert tickets to something I didn't really wanna go to and I'm like, what the fuck just happened?
Aversion is partly aversion to pain. So we are constantly numbing. Numbing can take the form of extreme work. I know I can speak for myself that I used to wake up on a Saturday morning. I'm like when is it to be done? Do I need to look after the kids?
You know, yeah, okay, cool. They cool breakfast. Okay. Visit to the museum. Okay. Now I'm gonna work for an hour. And it was like it's incredible how my inability to sit still translated into it's not even working all the time. It's just constantly being active.
My brain, the the the person, this fucking roommate that lives in my head wouldn't shut up for a minute. And aversion is, of course, also aversion to others. I am going to drive you to hate someone. Right? Which is why the Jewish question is always so interesting because if you look through history, they're always the tip of the spear of of these moments in history that where there's a lot of hate around.
And then ignorance is I just don't want you to know what's going on. This is this anti memetics division I was talking about. I was just gonna like, look at this hand. Don't look at the fact that I'm in your pocket. Right? Like, it's incredible how easily we like to stay in ignorance partly sometimes because of our own hypocrisy, right, around some of this stuff.
In any event, we need to be in stillness, and we need to look at these things and how we get caught. And then I hope, like, the worst marketing pitch in history, but I think the only way out of this is through the pain.
The human condition involves suffering and we do everything in our power especially in consumerist society to avoid feeling the pain. The loneliness, the emptiness, the whatever it is. And the great wisdom traditions all tell us the same thing. Sit with the uncomfortable. Emotions don't last.
Poor feelings don't last. When you cry, you cry for less than a minute then it's gone. But when you flushed mechanically you flush your hormones out of your body. So the way out of the pain is through the pain. The good news is on the other side of that if we just take the time to do it, you can get back to not necessarily happiness.
Happiness is difficult to engineer. But you can get to peace, internal peace, and you can get to something that resembles freedom. I am aware of the games that are being played, and they don't work on me. When you're in peace and freedom, you can be the author of your experience of the world instead of the experience being authored for you.
Whatever media mix you're gonna get fed, you're back to authoring the experience you want and then you can reconnect to beauty. I can tell you personally when I started exploring this inside myself, I ended up in this kind of dark night of the soul which is nothing means anything anymore and this is a piece of theater and I was going through the motions.
But then at some point I'm like, oh you know, I missed a beat here. There is beauty in everything. There's beauty in the blood coursing through my veins. There's beauty in being together in this room. There's beauty all around us in Edinburgh on a beautiful day, and it's just a question of being present to the beauty that is there.
My favorite quote from David White, beauty is the harvest of present. Beauty is the harvest of present. External horizon. Okay, cool. We're building companies. We're out in the world. Are we thinking about what we're doing? And the way I like to phrase this because this is not about being moralistic around you shouldn't build a shopping app.
I mean, for me, everything is fair game. We like entertainment. We like shopping. We like luxury. Like, this is not some kind of degrowth pitch. It's more a question of intentionality. And the question I like to ask is what's the quality of the conversation we're having with ourselves, with each other, but also with our customers?
You know, are we contributing to the kind of future that we want to see or are we optimizing the shit out of them, simply put? And what is our responsibility in building and owning that future because I don't think this is a rehearsal.
I was thinking about kind of a word or concept to leave you with and I'll say a couple of things. So the word is stewardship. Just gonna drop it there. Number one we have been given extraordinarily powerful tools. They're insanely powerful. They're versatile.
They're somewhat unpredictable and they're moving at nonlinear speed. So question number one is what are we doing with that? Is it a weapon or is it an instrument for growth? You know is it an instrument of abundance or is it an instrument of distraction?
And really thinking about what it is that we're building. I promise you as far as we know you only have one life there is nothing you need to do for anybody. You have full freedom to freaking decide what it is you want to do and so it's really a question of your own I don't wanna say moral ambition but something like that which in which direction are you putting your activity, your intelligence and your attention and what does that mean for the world.
And the second aspect of stewardship is we're like we're in the vortex of this incredible revolution and we are having a hard time making sense of it. I mean I'm in this group called AI Impact and I mean the amount of divergence you do in this group they're all AI specialists in terms of just understanding what's going on is extreme.
So we also have a role I think in rebuilding and sharing narratives that resemble truth that we can then bring out to the world and to these people in our families and people might lose their job in the call center in Aberdeen or whatever it is so that they can make sense of the world because what I see around me is fear, confusion, worry.
There's a lot of excitement but sometimes the excitement is a bit performative And so I think we are in a in a society that's very anxious right now. And so what role can we play in bringing good diagnostic, you know, solid narratives, a shared version of the truth, and then maybe new stories that we can believe in collectively?
