The (New) Social Dilemma

Kyle Harrison published a long (but incredible) newsletter that I think should become required reading for every founder going forward. In it, he discusses the critical importance of building a clear and compelling narrative around your company, and working to cultivate a passionate community of believers and supporters.

With this, I decided it was a good time to revisit the narrative around my own startup, DeepTrust , and why we are doing what we are doing. A lot has changed since I made a first attempt at documenting our reason for existence, and I think an update is long overdue. I know my last newsletter covered our journey so far as a company, but I think it’s critical to be clear on WHY we exist.

With that, I’d like to tell you a story.

Back in 2020, I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix and it shook me. Not because anything in it was a surprise, but because it was able to effectively articulate a lot of the concerns I’ve had growing up in the first generation with access to social media from a young age.

There was one quote in particular from the show that stood out to me, and continues to haunt me on an ongoing basis:

“With technology, you don’t have to overwhelm people’s strengths. You just have to overwhelm their weaknesses. This is overpowering human nature. And this is checkmate on humanity.” - Tristan Harris (Former design ethicist at Google)

In the show, the quote is referring to the addictive properties intentionally built into to social media platforms, but I think it applies much more broadly, and especially rings true when it comes to generative AI.

The last couple of years have seen incredible advances in the quality, application, and adoption of generative AI. While this has unlocked amazing new capabilities for humanity, it comes with a much darker new reality as well.

I believe that (continuing) rapid improvements in generative AI have made it so we can no longer rely on our own senses to help us discern what is real from what is fake online.

Specifically, going back to Tristan’s quote, I believe that AI has now surpassed human weakness, and is quickly approaching human strength.

The result of this is that... Read the rest here !

P.S. going forward I will be primarily publishing my newsletter on Substack

Please give it a follow there!

Substack is a much better platform for writing, managing and delivering newsletters than LinkedIn - plus they will be delivered directly to you going forward after you subscribe.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Noah