Cultural critic Ted Georia is one of Subsack’s number one voice. He is known for his wisdom and wit. It is titled in recent posts Our shared reality will self-destruct over the next 12 months. Gioia sounds the ultimate alarm. Trust is dead. Certainly already and certainly.
“It’s now possible to change reality and all sorts of historical records. Perhaps it’s rewarding. In the last few months, the technology for creating fake audio, video and text has improved dramatically. We may be able to get there soon, or have already already.
Billions of dollars are invested in desperate efforts to grasp the gold rings of AGI: artificial general information.
When technology outweighs human intelligence, singularities may be approaching. But intelligence was by no means the basis of trust. If that were the case, Rome would not have collapsed, Germany would not have elected Hitler, and our current president would not have taken office.
Ignorance was never a real danger. Rome was not ignorant, nor was it Germany. And not America either. Like them, we are not undoubted by stupidity than passions of strength enough to pass for reasons.
The reason is that our golden calves – our false god – conceal our wrath, despite us persuading us that we are wise. Consider the “rational” justification of the invasion of Iraq, the financial algorithm that fueled the economic collapse in 2008, or the indicators used to determine who to count as citizens.
And now we panic through AI metrics, as if human intelligence had been a robust foundation up until now. Count parameters, tokens, benchmarks, hallucinations, and guardrails. Count the numbers to reassure you that your machine is not reliable. But distrust is nothing new. It’s just our latest uncertainty registration. We aim to perform in the digital field rather than learning.
As I’m writing this now. Originality is artisan fiction. I naturally call my ingredients and list them as footnotes with no dates for sale. Fundamentalism asserts true originality while we monetize ourselves. Trust is on sale.
Avoiding AI is useless. Otherwise, it’s simple to think about. We condemn students for projecting our own fears. Much of what we do online is immediately authenticated when we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some scale, deployed in real time, and usually coordinates outcomes of interest, such as the behavior of people, machines, or organizations such as students or teachers.
Once your work is saved, you can flag it as “AI generated” if it’s published online in a database, for example, or kept in a file, especially if it’s too good to be true (how can you tell me how AI “makes it more human”? If you are in doubt, consult a human). The author is making a fuss. The lawyer is spending his outdoor day.
Does artificial intelligence undermine trust more than human reasoning itself? There are a lot of imitations and intelligence is not a guarantee of purchase. Trust is human responsibility and is woven from personality, accountability and judgment. This is exactly what machines can’t supply. To blame AI for lack of trust is to miss the point. The default was always ours.
“Hurry to that mystery – to know more. Doubt allows God to live.” – Fanny Howe, Wedding dress.
Perhaps our unreliable things will only serve us by making our reflexes uneasy to put confidence in the wrong place. As Howe suggests, doubt is not a flaw, but a way to keep room for something bigger than us.
If certainty creates arrogance, distrust can teach humility. And humility creates space for things we cannot control or calculate. It may be someone who saves grace in an age where we fear machines more than ourselves: doubt is temperament both It depends on technology and Our overconfidence in human judgment.
And that might be what Gioia’s alarms will finally leave us – not that trust is dead, it must be rediscovered on another ground.
Trust is not something that technology can give back to us, nor is it ultimately usable to take away. It is human work to refuse to reduce life to data points and probability. Intelligence could become another golden calf. It is promoted for sparkle rather than for its truth.
If AI exposes the limits of human intelligence, it is much better. It reminds us that what unites us – faithfulness, humility, courage – was not the achievement of wisdom. Rediscovering trust there may stabilize us from panic and prepare us to live more honestly with each other and with the machines we have created.
Notes and reading
Mark Chagal, Worship of the Golden Calve (1966), Wove Paper Color Lithograph, 19¾ x 14½ inches. Chagor depicts the impatience of the Israelis in Sinai. Unable to wait for them to return at Moses’ commandments, they created more accessible objects of God’s existence. Musée National Marc Chagall, good. – Wikiart. Chagor reimagined faith beyond tradition.
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Alfred, Tennyson Lord, At Memoam (1850), Canto 96, Line65. Tennyson once said: “I believe in a constantly living God, but I don’t know how he is or what he is.” He rejected strict dogmaticism, but remained theologically leaning, sometimes speaking abstract and almost pantheistic terms about God.
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Ted Georia, Honest broker Substack (August 20, 2025). A cultural analyst and media theorist, Gioia is concerned about the apocalyptic tone, raising the drama of disintegration as much as the warning itself.
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Platon to Chatgput – Ancient Greek ideas of intelligence and today’s technology. Ryan’s eck, USC Dornsif (July 18, 2025). Leack is a professor of writing at the University of Southern California and is known for linking rhetoric, philosophy, quantum mechanics and poetry with debates about the nature of AI and thought.
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Renaissance humanists and LLMS – Like today’s large-scale language models, 16th century humanists devised techniques to automate writing. “Systematic Banality” – Hannah Katznelson, ion (May 5, 2025): Berkle Naissance, California and early stages Modern research.
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Fanny Howe – Wedding Dress: Words and Life Meditation (2003). Howe was acclaimed poet, novelist and writer of short stories, and thanked Edith Stein and Simone Weil. She herself converted to Catholicism. – Hau passed away on July 8, 2025.
“Proof of the rights and obligations of artificial creatures” – Artificial life after FrankensteinEren M. Hunt (2024). Please refer The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Post-Apocalyptic Imagination (2024). Hunt is a professor of political science at Notre Dame. Martha Nussbaum wrote: “Hunt reveals a burning account of a catastrophe that fits our time, but also discovers constructive projects that face the worst of the worst with love, hope and connections with others.” Dystopia? Utopia? Or something good.
Lost History
Tip #224 – Not the first time
Approx. 2 + 2 = 5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
