We’re all cyborgs already, we just haven’t fully integrated it yet.

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I’ve been concerned for quite a while now that we’re heading into a new dark age.

Not because of too little information, but because of too much. And we have no idea which information to trust.

With AI and deepfakes, we can’t trust pictures or videos or audio or voices.

With the loss of trust in institutions and experts, our ability to discern truth from falsehood, especially on complex topics that require specialized knowledge, will only continue to diminish.

We’ll need new a new class of diviners, oracles, shamans, prophets, dowsers, and priests.

Homeopathy and homebrewed treatments, medically sound or not, will continue to replace medical interventions approved by the FDA or recommended by the CDC.

Doctors will be increasingly viewed with the same level of suspicion as used car salesmen.

Large Language Models will grow more powerful, more lifelike, and eventually be seen as more trustworthy than humans by many who have access to them.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology,” Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, “is indistinguishable from magic.”

Kale Zelden

and I were talking on the phone yesterday — which is a very old-fashioned thing to do — about the scientific study of paranormal phenomena at places like Skinwalker Ranch. Kale made the point that Modernism eliminated the mystical and replaced it with the empirical. And yet, we both agreed that there is something fascinating going on as scientific instrumentation and methods are used to study and try to understand mysteries that seem to defy known scientific laws.

There is something almost medieval about this entire phenomenon.

Older kinds of magic are still with us, too, and they are determined to remain inscrutable.

The line in the silicon, if it was ever going to be drawn, needed to be drawn before cell phones.

Are you old enough to remember the before time? When there was no internet, and everything was slow and synchronous and analog and linear? Nobody knew how much they didn’t know, but they remembered a lot more than they do now, with access to everything

How many of the phone numbers of your closest friends and family do you know by heart? How much of your memory do you outsource to note apps or email archives or curation tools?

Have you spoken with an elderly person recently? Even the ones on the threshold of dementia have a startling clarity of detail. Names, dates, locations, relationships between the characters in stories they tell about things that happened 50 or 60 years ago. They never adapted to tech that allowed them to forget, so they have Rolodexes in their heads. It’s almost incomprehensible for us to imagine so much specificity without looking things up.

Do you remember what it was like not to reach for your phone every time you had a moment to yourself? At a stoplight, in a grocery store line, waiting in the car for your spouse, taking a trip to the rest room?

There’s a quote attributed to the father of the cyberpunk genre, William Gibson, that goes like this: “The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”

To riff off of that: we’re all cyborgs already, we just haven’t fully integrated it yet.