AI and our Post-Truth Predicament

We now live in a chilling era of “post-truth”. Some of us are paddling through piles of lies. Others are sinking in fictions, misinformation and myth. From the Stone Age to the Silicone Age, Homo Sapiens have witnessed a meteoritic rise in connectivity, and the flow of information, without a concomitant rise in truthfulness.

The output is fake news, clickbait, misinformation, insidious confusion, spin, and disinformation in the infosphere. How then can AI navigate the uninterrupted varieties of post-truth phenomena and other pollutants in the infosphere?

Language connects people, and the outcome is a network. Language is not representation alone. It is a nexus that creates interconnections. During the Cold War cheap radios were widely available in East and West Germany, however, politics used the same technology differently on both sides of the 43.1 km long wall of brick and barbed wire.

Over thirty years the technology created two different networks of information, and a people bounded by a common past, geography, art and gastronomy suddenly had two opposing outlooks of the future.

Nearly 5,000 people attempted to climb over the wall. The “Iron Curtain” became an emblem of the division in Europe between facing West or East.  The curtain itself did not create the opposing outlooks, but the use of technology to distribute information did.

Seeing language as a nexus allows us to unravel many aspects of human history that stun the naïve outlook of information and language as mere representation. Speech is a property of man alone. Moreover, in the behaviour called speech, the human is both a peculiar and unique animal on earth. We are Homo – Loquen –  a talking animal.

The discovery and documentation of the existence of Dutch lexicon Creoles in Guyana, remained a phenomenon whose existence had been widely rejected by Creole linguists until Professor Ian Robertson made the first audio recording of Berbice Dutch.

His work with the last known speaker of this language is monumental. Professor Robertson introduced me to the idea of “endangered languages”. On one occasion he invited me to join him on a canoe expedition into the interior of Guyana. But I was too afraid of the rainforest to follow him to record the last remaining speaker of an endangered language. You had to carry everything, including lots of batteries.

What stood out the most for me from his discovery is an abiding awareness of language as a social nexus. If the person he was meeting, was the last remaining speaker of Berbice Dutch – who did he speak to every day? And if he spoke to other people, how much of what he said did they truly understand?

Information can bend reality and sometimes it can represent it, but either way it always connects. The secret of the success of the homo – loquen is the ability to use language to connect countless individuals. Regrettably, this talent also supports believing in lies, mistakes, and whims.  Galileo was alone in his belief that the earth moved.

Language connects millions of humans into living networks. Unfortunately, the constant retelling of a fake memory or myth can cause us to accept it as an authentic recollection of the facts.

It is a myth that plantation economies in the Caribbean relied on cheap labour. Plantation owners purchased humans trafficked using costly trade goods such as Indian cottons, brass articles from Germany, and glassware from Bohemia.

European Saltwater Slavery relied on the trafficking of humans from Africa to the Caribbean because European workers would not freely migrate to the West Indies to enrich Caribbean plantation economies with their labour.

What was cheap was lavish fertile land. The persistent shortage of plantation labour was fuelled not just by the availability of land, but by the speed with which Europeans became landowners.

It is also far from the truth that the British were the first to abolish the slave trade. In 1792, the Danes abolished their slave trade. The Westminster parliament passed the Foreign Slave Trade Act in 1792. This legislation barred Britons from participating in the slave trade of other countries. The following year they abolished British Slavery. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 was an act of the British Parliament that outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire. It came into effect on May 1, 1807. However, the enslaved in the colonies, excluding geographies governed by the East India Company were not freed until 1838 – and only after slave-owners, rather than the enslaved, received handsome compensation.

Searching the AI horizon, the future will be a clutter of DeepSeek-R-1-style Open-Source disruptors.  A multipolar AI world may soon emerge. A world partitioned by Silicon Curtains that barricade rival digital AI empires. Latin America and the Caribbean may have to choose their unique answers to the alignment problem, depending on the futures that they may wish to create. The Qataris may be part of a Middle Eastern network with Russia and Iran. Tongans may be part of a Chinese network. Tuvaluans may come to have worldviews and experiences that are American. However, at this time, the new AI silicon curtains may not solve the problems of misinformation and lies that are part of our post-truth predicament.