To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit.

The problems facing Canada or the world—not just climate change but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment—aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.

Planetary thinking embraces the liminal phenomena and complex butterfly effects that tie us together, but it must also contend with the diffuse patterns of terrestrial agency that will shape our response to the planetary condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our efforts to adapt to climate change, which will further create the future’s winners and losers. Some geographies will suffer such intense drought that they may be fully vacated, while others such as Canada and Kazakhstan will gain millions of grateful climate migrants and be able to harness their human capital to become new power centers. The world will no longer be bureaucratically divided into investment grade categories set by ratings agencies that label them as a “developed market” (DM) or “emerging market” (EM), but between climate resilient and non-climate resilient zones. If institutionalized orders such as the late 20th-century multilateral system tended to be established only after major wars, would an entropic drift into regional spheres of influence be preferable to a World War III among dueling hegemons? In this scenario, conflicts may flare from Ukraine to Taiwan, but they would be ring-fenced within their respective regions rather than becoming tripwires for global conflict. Regions that strive for greater self-sufficiency, such as North America and Europe today, could reduce the carbon intensity of their economies and trade, but potentially at the cost of undermining their interdependence with and leverage over other regions. Such is the double-edged nature of an entropic world.

Rather than appealing to some vague notion of the awesomeness of progress, or the malignity of technology, we want, collectively, to coordinate on paths of technological development that will have spread benefits as broadly as possible, while mitigating for, or compensating for the costs.

LLMs should not be viewed as a substitute for high quality human generated knowledge. They should instead be viewed as an obligate complement to such knowledge - a means of making it more useful, which doesn’t have much independent worth without it.

If misinformation is a societal disease, it should be possible to cure societies of various problems by eradicating it.