https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/

Jennifer Ouellette published an excellent obit for philosopher Daniel Dennett today at Ars Technica. Dennett has, for decades, been a well known and widely loved and hated voice on a range of subjects, including the nature of consciousness (a "user illusion"), the New Atheism (with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others), and Artificial Intelligence.

I've always found Dennett an interesting thinker, despite disagreeing with many of his ideas, but this comment from Ouellette's obituary for him seems important and on the mark:

In his later years, Dennett wasn't shy about sounding the alarm regarding AI, even writing an article for The Atlantic last year on the topic about the dangers ahead, particularly with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT. "The most pressing problem is not that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going to change warfare, but that they’re going to destroy human trust," he told Tufts Now. "They’re going to move us into a world where you can’t tell truth from falsehood. You don’t know who to trust. Trust turns out to be one of the most important features of civilization, and we are now at great risk of destroying the links of trust that have made civilization possible."

And regarding that, here's the umpty-ninth story you've seen about AI screwing with our ability to trust what we see and hear:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/microsofts-vasa-1-can-deepfake-a-person-with-one-photo-and-one-audio-track/

The Great Awakening is literally about waking people up to the fact that most of our so-called Authorities cannot be trusted (and to even more important truths as well, but that's another story). But that is a problem rooted in MALICE and CORRUPTION: for society to work, for the market place to work, and -- as Dennett points out -- for civilization itself to function, we HAVE to be able to TRUST others.

Taking down the Cabal is, to a large extent, an effort to RESTORE TRUST in the institutions necessary to human society, including in trust of those individuals we know personally (doctors, teachers, grocers, pastors, etc. and the friends and family members who are influenced by those people).

AI could help with that in many ways, but it could also destroy trust even more easily and widely, or so I believe. At the very least, it's a topic we should be aware of and thinking about.