“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven Rosenbaum
Truth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornography. It might be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or perhaps you know it, when you don’t see it.
His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, with a foreword by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, takes a cast of tech futurists — Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Lessig, Gary Marcus, Esther Dyson, David Chalmers — and asks what happens to truth in our AI age.
AI is, at its core, Rosenbaum’s tech mavens report, a spectacularly good liar. It tells us exactly what we want to hear. And even when it knows it’s wrong, he says, it lies. Rather than a bug, lying is a core, perhaps the core feature of AI.
I’m not so sure. Humans have always been spectacularly good liars too. Stories are a kind of untruth. Cinema is, by definition, an untruth. Television had ads. Every medium has been corrupted by commercial interest. But, for Rosenbaum, AI is different. Truth then has no future in our AI age. Except, of course, in books like The Future of Truth.
