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It *cannot* be our future that we have to withdraw into a self-curated circle of trusted friends, and that we regard all news media as “fake”, because we will doubtless fall into circles of self-perpetuating falsehoods.

The scientific process allowed us to let go of our insular circles of trust, and to *federate knowledge-gathering and verification* so that truth-seeking becomes a *communal activity*. The same must continue for news-gathering: we must have a *federated* community of journalists whose stories we can cross-check with reality, to get a sense of the truth.

And as for AI poisoning the well, I do think things will get a lot worse. The signal-to-noise ratio on the web will become worse, and we would need to work harder to tease the truth from the lies. But I have faith that there will be a sufficiently large number of humans who develop techniques to fight the garbage.

We must continue to federate the search for truth. We cannot fall back to insular, hermetic societies with dangerous blind spots.