Your article adresses a matter of epochal importance.
In France, we have an interesting thinker over those issues: Gérald Bronner, who notably published "Cognitive Apocalypse".
In current news, the whole world is watching in disbelief as Americans elected a president so widely known to be corrupt and unqualified, and as this president manages so unobstructedly to destroy his nation's standing and profound interests. How can that be? Such a massive cognitive collapse, that remains to be fully studied and understood - with strong lessons for nations wise enough to hear them.
A future article about "How to balance freedom of speech with cognitive exhaustion, for the salvation of democracies" would be quite interesting (1/ coupled with "campaign financing laws" and "media plurality and accountability" maybe 2/ I know you already covered those topics, but maybe you have "updates" on them ? 3/ I acknowledge us Europeans get a lot of flak for being too repressive on this, partly deserved... although when the accusation comes from Elon Musk I'm very OK with our rules).
You live in a bubble and don't realize it or don't acknowledge it. Your statement about "a president so ... corrupt and unqualified" could be applied by many people to either of the last two presidents, yet you evidently are referring to only one of them. You might be uninformed about the other, or consciously participating in the gaslighting. I don't say all this to be disrespectful but more in a campaign to better understand all sides of issues, moreso as an unbiased observer than as a rooting fan of one side or the other.
Great insight and you have my support. Most of the mechanics of what you are proposing seem doable with people, time and resources, mainly AI. I see one one aspect that you haven't fully explained or explored here and that is the world view used to measure and push the direction of the content.
I've used and enjoyed pushing Grok and Claude to explore political events and more interesting climate change projections. The biases embraced by both AIs is difficult to shake because in many instances the news feeds they source are biased by volume alone. Getting an AI world view that is stable (won't drift) in my view is the most critical aspect of your project. It would be used as a yard stick to craft the narrative.
If we're not careful AI will be used to roll back our ability to communicate all the way to the Neolithic. This applies now: we will be limited to face to face contact since everything else can be maliciously faked with AI. For example who still answers phone calls? But also over time. We are basically about to un-invent writing. AI is poisoning our more permanent records, like research, books. Go to Amazon and a lot of searches for books already yield AI slop. And many Google search results almost completely consist of AI slop content farms.
(Also reminder to people that, if you spend hours and hours scrolling 30 sec videos on Tik Tok you're little more than a meat bag plugged into the Matrix. So don't do that, and if you know people who do, maybe gently get them to stop)
An interesting element to the "content explosion" is that the people creating most of the content are still limited in their imagination on what is actually interesting. We seem to be getting "lots more of the same" rather than people wandering off to create their own unique niches in the information ecology. I think that's the trick to survival. The tools aren't coming up with good ideas (how can they, LLMs are trained on what is already there) - but they will hyper-accelerate those that are creatively different in what they approach.
Wondering about some of your assumptions, eg, bias. Is it really possible to be unbiased? While the aspiration may be needed, it might be more honest and authentic to regularly self explore what biases actually are at play.
The chart captures something most people feel but can’t articulate — AI doesn’t just add more content, it reshapes the entire quality distribution. The middle collapses. What’s left is either genuinely great or commoditized noise. The bet worth making is on the quality end, because that’s where human judgment still has a moat.
What is required of great developing news reporting? Eyes and ears on the ground, talking to people, confirming or uncovering the official line as a lie. Everyone was reporting the Hamas line when covering the Gaza war. Was it true? Nobody knows.
Great investigative reporting may begin with a deep dive through archives, but eventually it will require talking to people in depth, interviews which will either make or break the story.
To do news reporting better than NYT, you must do talking to the right people better than NYT. You will need to add journalists to that list of employees if you truly aim for a publication within the top 95% bracket.
Nice aspiration but I am unclear what your service is going to do better than others.
I use RSS. I read 40 or so feed every day and comment widely. My feeds range the gamut from politics to economics to general news to science to AI to health to ... Most of the writing is redundant and boring.
Then on top of the RSS feeds are the email and the notifications of new content from the Substack writers I follow. Your substack occasionally has an interesting article to read as do some other SS's like Works in Progress and Peter H. Diamandis 'Metatrends'. But the vast majority of SS writing is not worth reading and certainly not worth paying for. And the constant SS writer attempts at monterizing their content quickly gets old.
But all the great content in the world is of little value, except perhaps for the sake of personal learning, if you have no one to discuss it with. This is why SS will never be a real success. SS Is just islands of writing with little commenting or follow-on commenting. Same with the NYT and almost every other publishing entity.
Facebook, NextDoor, YouTube and others have built their own ecosystems that attempt to keep people on their properties, engaging with a never ending feed of videos, articles and comments, while showing ads but there is little to be learned on any of these services. It's mostly slop, AI or otherwise or just simple entertainment sucking up time.
So again, unsure what you think you can change with your nw organization that will have any greater effect on the world than what has been tried and failed before. AND that people will presumably be expected to pay for.
Interesting. Have a look at my feed, the articles are completely AI generated (I choose a one sentence topic). It's been an interesting side project getting AI to produce writing that isn't slop and doesn't have the same metaphysical priors as the model I'm using.
Get a better name than "Uncharted Territories". That was ok for the curious, but if you are thinking mainstream, abet something more positive.
Hi Tomas, thanks for your article. I saw a link for hiring but not one for investing, are you planning to include one?
You missed April Fools Day with this.
I'd invest, a crowdfunding scheme could work
Yes I am interested in investing! Also consider platforms such as microventures.
Great projet, I wish you all the best !
Your article adresses a matter of epochal importance.
In France, we have an interesting thinker over those issues: Gérald Bronner, who notably published "Cognitive Apocalypse".
In current news, the whole world is watching in disbelief as Americans elected a president so widely known to be corrupt and unqualified, and as this president manages so unobstructedly to destroy his nation's standing and profound interests. How can that be? Such a massive cognitive collapse, that remains to be fully studied and understood - with strong lessons for nations wise enough to hear them.
A future article about "How to balance freedom of speech with cognitive exhaustion, for the salvation of democracies" would be quite interesting (1/ coupled with "campaign financing laws" and "media plurality and accountability" maybe 2/ I know you already covered those topics, but maybe you have "updates" on them ? 3/ I acknowledge us Europeans get a lot of flak for being too repressive on this, partly deserved... although when the accusation comes from Elon Musk I'm very OK with our rules).
You live in a bubble and don't realize it or don't acknowledge it. Your statement about "a president so ... corrupt and unqualified" could be applied by many people to either of the last two presidents, yet you evidently are referring to only one of them. You might be uninformed about the other, or consciously participating in the gaslighting. I don't say all this to be disrespectful but more in a campaign to better understand all sides of issues, moreso as an unbiased observer than as a rooting fan of one side or the other.
Great insight and you have my support. Most of the mechanics of what you are proposing seem doable with people, time and resources, mainly AI. I see one one aspect that you haven't fully explained or explored here and that is the world view used to measure and push the direction of the content.
I've used and enjoyed pushing Grok and Claude to explore political events and more interesting climate change projections. The biases embraced by both AIs is difficult to shake because in many instances the news feeds they source are biased by volume alone. Getting an AI world view that is stable (won't drift) in my view is the most critical aspect of your project. It would be used as a yard stick to craft the narrative.
What do you think?
Good luck.
If we're not careful AI will be used to roll back our ability to communicate all the way to the Neolithic. This applies now: we will be limited to face to face contact since everything else can be maliciously faked with AI. For example who still answers phone calls? But also over time. We are basically about to un-invent writing. AI is poisoning our more permanent records, like research, books. Go to Amazon and a lot of searches for books already yield AI slop. And many Google search results almost completely consist of AI slop content farms.
(Also reminder to people that, if you spend hours and hours scrolling 30 sec videos on Tik Tok you're little more than a meat bag plugged into the Matrix. So don't do that, and if you know people who do, maybe gently get them to stop)
An interesting element to the "content explosion" is that the people creating most of the content are still limited in their imagination on what is actually interesting. We seem to be getting "lots more of the same" rather than people wandering off to create their own unique niches in the information ecology. I think that's the trick to survival. The tools aren't coming up with good ideas (how can they, LLMs are trained on what is already there) - but they will hyper-accelerate those that are creatively different in what they approach.
Vamos! 💪
This is beautiful. Thank you for your efforts, and for this terrific vision.
Wondering about some of your assumptions, eg, bias. Is it really possible to be unbiased? While the aspiration may be needed, it might be more honest and authentic to regularly self explore what biases actually are at play.
The chart captures something most people feel but can’t articulate — AI doesn’t just add more content, it reshapes the entire quality distribution. The middle collapses. What’s left is either genuinely great or commoditized noise. The bet worth making is on the quality end, because that’s where human judgment still has a moat.
What is required of great developing news reporting? Eyes and ears on the ground, talking to people, confirming or uncovering the official line as a lie. Everyone was reporting the Hamas line when covering the Gaza war. Was it true? Nobody knows.
Great investigative reporting may begin with a deep dive through archives, but eventually it will require talking to people in depth, interviews which will either make or break the story.
To do news reporting better than NYT, you must do talking to the right people better than NYT. You will need to add journalists to that list of employees if you truly aim for a publication within the top 95% bracket.
Nice aspiration but I am unclear what your service is going to do better than others.
I use RSS. I read 40 or so feed every day and comment widely. My feeds range the gamut from politics to economics to general news to science to AI to health to ... Most of the writing is redundant and boring.
Then on top of the RSS feeds are the email and the notifications of new content from the Substack writers I follow. Your substack occasionally has an interesting article to read as do some other SS's like Works in Progress and Peter H. Diamandis 'Metatrends'. But the vast majority of SS writing is not worth reading and certainly not worth paying for. And the constant SS writer attempts at monterizing their content quickly gets old.
But all the great content in the world is of little value, except perhaps for the sake of personal learning, if you have no one to discuss it with. This is why SS will never be a real success. SS Is just islands of writing with little commenting or follow-on commenting. Same with the NYT and almost every other publishing entity.
Facebook, NextDoor, YouTube and others have built their own ecosystems that attempt to keep people on their properties, engaging with a never ending feed of videos, articles and comments, while showing ads but there is little to be learned on any of these services. It's mostly slop, AI or otherwise or just simple entertainment sucking up time.
So again, unsure what you think you can change with your nw organization that will have any greater effect on the world than what has been tried and failed before. AND that people will presumably be expected to pay for.
Interesting. Have a look at my feed, the articles are completely AI generated (I choose a one sentence topic). It's been an interesting side project getting AI to produce writing that isn't slop and doesn't have the same metaphysical priors as the model I'm using.
You are kidding about hiring Vibe Coders, right?
Just say no AI slop code.