Why We Build
One silver-lining to the dead internet we're living in, today, is that it's very quickly teaching us that we can't rely on our senses as much as we believe we can. It's not healthy to always live in skepticism, but it is necessary in a World where you don't know what's up or down anymore.
That's why we need great minds to focus their attention on solving the problems associated with credible information sharing without it becoming some centralized playground designed to look like the free-flowing exchange of ideas. If we don't solve for that, then I guess we're heading into a future that a small handful of people want because elections or public opinion will no longer matter.
One of the biggest focuses in AI should be in figuring out how to get it to provide deep credible knowledge in specific domains that can be best applied to the problems we're trying to solve. Sure, it can do this with enough fenagling, but what I really mean is having something easy for everyone to use like Perplexity or Gemini, only it doesn't simply find consensus information from the internet using all these black box methods that are owned by major corporations.
Instead, it should use direct knowledge from domain experts who structure and cite their material and as users, we should be able to backtrack all of it, including the original author. And all of this should be achievable by simply engaging with a chatbot agent that can reliably go out and help me discover all of these things.
Also, we shouldn't have to simply trust that the application works. We should be able to go in and see exactly how it's working. This way, the public can audit the systems we're relying on for grounding our worldviews.
That, to me, is where we should be if we really want to break from the chains of propaganda and reclaim our genuine thoughts about how we ought to live. The alternative independent media space was co-opted long ago and now all of the feeds keep us in a state of perpetual dislocation from our friends, family, communities, new solutions, and better approximations to the truth.
We exist in a walled-off digital pasture. But if regular people who are smart and capable enough decide to leverage this new technology, then we can break through the fencing and finally live in a world where discovery-based researching and learning can be easier than Google, which could eventually individuate society again, like how it was before, instead of keeping us clustered into specific groups based on our viewing preferences.
That's why my brother and I got into this business. Yeah, sure, we also wanna make a buck so we can retire with dignity. That's true. But the drive has always stemmed from wanting to figure out a better way for people to share hidden insights and create things that are bigger than they thought they could handle. We have a long way to go, but we're making the first small steps, even if it isn't obvious, just yet.
Bottom line, though? Humanity must figure out a way to help us master the means and methods of discovery-based knowledge acquisition, execution, and immediate distribution of information based on relevancy and needs from those who search instead of those who passively soak information in from the curated feeds. And all of this needs to be easy enough for a 12 year-old to do.
If anyone else is working on this problem, we'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it's through a DM. We're living in the most exciting times, but with adventure, comes danger. So maybe, idk. Let's make it more fun and less hazardous, so that we can, at least, live long enough to re-tell this great story that we're all a part of.