[IAmGraydon]

Precisely. That’s the elephant in the room and I’ll admit I’m surprised no one seems to want to address it yet. How long can it go on before the fantasy has to collapse back to its ground state?

And yeah - there have been a number of events that have occurred in the last 5-6 years that remind one of this. The Covid conspiracy theories. The mass drone sighting delusions. Things like that. I think it’s all coming from the over-connectedness of social media and mass communication in general. Fantasies are allowed to spread and become “truth” with zero filter or critical thought. Once this on comes back down to earth, who knows what the next thing will be? Like I said before, I think we have our eyes on the wrong danger here. It’s not AI, but it is the propagation of increasingly convincing mass delusions. A society and a country are a collection of people with shared beliefs. So what happens when no one knows what to believe anymore?

[i2km]

Much as I dislike some of Peter Thiel's ideas, I fully agree with him that Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire is at the heart of the explanation. We've always been imitators who need to copy behavior and sentiments, but social media has turbocharged this cycle, allowing mass delusions and panics to be cycled through every few years. The herd always works itself up into a frenzy before collapsing and, a couple of years later, moving on to the next delusion/panic.

And when people are gripped by these crowd-following delusions it definitely leads to the baffling blindness to reality...