Cultures persist because of a confidence in themselves. Common agreement binds them together, and they endure for as long as their collective understanding is based on reality. But what happens if the assumptions that they make are faulty? The incongruity between the beliefs motivating their behaviour and the actual reality in which they live instigates increasing conflicts until reality asserts itself with a dispassionate shrug and the culture experiences the discomfort of a minor reset or the trauma of a major one.
From the perspective of a slightly reformed culture or a totally restructured one, these old assumptions and beliefs now seem like hallucinations. Given our understanding in the 21st century, the concepts of a few centuries ago seem bizarre. The sun rotated around the earth. Stars were light shining through the holes in the floor of Heaven. Witches, instead of being recognized as healers and midwives, were drowned or burned at the stake for flying on broomsticks, conjoining with Satan, souring beer, or instigating other acts of mischief or evil. Wearing a ring of posies would guard against The Plague. Bloodletting would restore health by reducing an excess of “humour”. History has recast these practices and beliefs as hallucinations.
Nate Hagens, writing “I Don’t Know” in his October 28, 2025 contribution to The Great Simplification, explores this subject with respect to artificial intelligence (AI) and our present culture. ChatGPT-5, the latest and most advanced version of a large language model AI, depending on its source material, frequently gives wrong answers or “hallucinates”. As a product marketed as “intelligent”, ChatGPT-5 is not programmed to conclude that it doesn’t know. Rather than admitting ignorance on any given subject, it provides answers even when they are incorrect. Hagens provides a classical example. In response to the prompt, “cheese not sticking to pizza”, ChatGPT-5 suggested, “Cheese can slide off pizza for a number of reasons, including too much sauce, too much cheese, or thickened sauce. Here are some things to try: Mix in sauce: Mixing cheese into the sauce helps add moisture to the cheese and dry out the sauce. You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.”
Hagens makes the obvious connection. “One could argue,” he writes, “that overconfidence and lack of caution is one of the core underlying drivers of the maximum power principle, which itself is underpinning global human ecological overshoot and the impending great simplification.” In other words, we place too much confidence in our ability and in the capability of our technology to solve the global ecological problems that they have jointly created. The assumption, that a technological solution to a problem caused by technology is going to be solved by technology, may well be a fatal hallucination.
Can we sequester into porous rock and depleted oil wells the billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide that we have emitted and continue to emit into the atmosphere? Can we extract sufficient carbon dioxide from the air to stop the planet from overheating? Given that the oceans are going to continually rise for centuries due to thermal expansion and ice melt, can we save our coastal cities and communities from inundation? How do we end the dire consequences of ocean acidification? Can we sufficiently regulate global weather to avoid successive climate catastrophes? Can we stop the northward migration of tropical diseases and parasites? Can we remove microplastics from our ecosystems?
Since the Renaissance of the 16th century, the Age of Science of the 17th century, the Age of Reason of the 18th century, and the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century, we have been on a trajectory of growing confidence. Science and technology have solved many problems, and given us an unprecedented sense of empowerment.
But power is not the same as omnipotence. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we have set our brooms and buckets to work, but do we know how to stop them? Do we think we can improve on pizza by adding non-toxic glue? Digital technology is another extension of ourselves. It thinks how we think because we set it to thinking the way that we want to think.
Hagens recognizes that “I don’t know” is the beginning of a cautionary process that may lead to our salvation from the pitfalls of hubris. If we acknowledge that we really don’t know what we are doing, that we don’t know where we are going, and we don’t know what the consequences will be, then a pause in our headlong plunge into a technological future may give the remnants of nature some chance for survival. Anyone for pizza without glue?
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: AI artwork done by David J via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)