The Cartesian Crisis

The Cartesian Crisis, as detailed in this more verbose essay, represents an unprecedented existential threat to humanity’s ability to discern reality from fiction. We stand at a critical juncture where the foundations of truth are being systematically dismantled by a perfect storm of technological and social forces, leaving civilization adrift in a sea of manufactured illusions.

This crisis emerges from multiple vectors of attack on our collective ability to reason. The institutional pillars of knowledge have succumbed to ideological corruption, while our communication channels are now dominated by algorithmic manipulation that distorts the natural flow of human discourse. Perhaps most alarmingly, artificial intelligence has emerged as the ultimate weapon in this war against truth, capable of generating convincing yet entirely fabricated realities at a scale that overwhelms human discernment.

The infiltration of AI-generated content has reached staggering levels, leading many to question just how much of the internet remains real. This has led to the concept of the “dead internet,” where all interaction and content becomes bot-driven.

The algorithmic takeover of the creation of all content is rapidly accelerating while we are simultaneously loosing information amidst all the noise.

Digital Decay Of The Internet:
- 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer available today
- Digital decay is accelerating from 3.4% per year (2013-2018) to 6% per year recently
- 49% of links cited in Supreme Court decisions are now broken
AI Content Generation:
- 77% of Americans have been misled by AI-generated content online
- Over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles are flagged as AI-generated
- Students submitted more than 22 million potentially AI-generated papers in the past year
Academic Research:
- AI-generated research papers increased from 3.61% to 6.22% between Nov 2022-2023
- 15.8% of peer reviews were written using AI assistance
- AI-assisted reviews had 14.4% higher odds of assigning higher scores than human reviews
Educational:
- Teachers report spending more time detecting AI plagiarism than providing actual writing feedback
- Concerns about students skipping crucial brain development stages by relying on AI
Job Applications:
- AI is being used to automatically create resumes and apply to 1000s of jobs for a single individual
- Recruiters are using AI avatars to interview applicants to filter out the AI-generated applications
Marketing and Influence:
- AI now facilitates the creation of up to 1000 simulated TikTok accounts for clients.

The machinery of deception grows more sophisticated daily. State actors and powerful corporations deploy armies of bots for social engineering, while AI-powered tools like HeyGen enable the creation of synthetic media indistinguishable from reality. We are constructing the means of our own cognitive demise—the destruction of our collective wisdom and sanity.

What becomes of us when we can know nothing for sure, when even our own thoughts deceive us? There seem to be no answers, and very few are cautioning us to slow down our approach to this dystopian end. We might not survive primitive AI long enough to ever encounter the X-risk concerns.