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Karl Marx was wrong. The critical issue is not who owns what Marx called “the means of production,” meaning the industrial machines. The critical issue today is not industrial but technological. The industrial age made factories and brought people out of their cottages and into cities. Cities and factories needed energy—oil, coal and electricity. This begat drilling, mining and damming.

Later, the automobile created roads, freeways, interstates and suburbs. Suburbs broke up the extended family and left the nuclear family—idealized by husband, wife, 2.3 children plus a dog, all guarded by a white picket fence. This created the motel, the drive-in and, along with “the Pill,” changed our mating and matrimonial morés. It didn’t make much difference who owned the car factory or which Pharma profited from “the Pill.”

Today we live in growing fear of artificial intelligence and its potential for overwhelming the organic intelligence of humanity. Yes, this is a challenge, a problem and a threat, but not our greatest threat.

Our fundamental existential crisis is not technological but epistemological. We no longer share an agreement on what is true and what is real. When the late Senator Daniel Moynihan remarked, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” he didn’t foresee our world of “alternative facts.”

Today we dispute nearly everything. With our understandable skepticism, which morphs easily into cynicism, we can take little at face value. We reject explanations that don’t fit our predilections and seek, and therefore find, conspiracies.

My generation began distrusting official narratives from JFK’s assassination and the Warren Report. It just couldn’t have been the one communist in Texas who changed history and broke our hearts. It had to be the Mafia or the CIA, or Khruschev or LBJ. We went on to wonder at the shifting and shifty explanations for the Vietnam War. Was it to stop China, or defend South Vietnam’s democracy (which wasn’t democratic), or to prevent the dominoes from falling throughout Southeast Asia? Or maybe it was for oil.

More recently, we have wrestled with 9/11. Some posited that a primitive turban-wearing Arab hiding in Tora Bora couldn’t have organized it. Must be clever Israelis. Or maybe it was orchestrated by President George W for reasons that remain unclear. We saw film purporting to show missiles, not planes, crashing into the Pentagon.

We naturally had to ask the critical question of our time: What is real? Since we can’t trust our politicians, nor corporate spokesfolks, nor any “official explanation,” can we trust our eyes? When we look at a picture, are we seeing a depiction of reality? How much does a picture need to be tweaked, cleaned and photoshopped before it becomes a false representation? We get spam and spoofs trying to manipulate our politics and purchases. We get “catfished, pig butchered and phished.” To survive, we must decide what is real, but we can seldom be certain.

From CGI (Computer Generated Images) to AI, we wonder if some famous actor really endorsed a product guaranteed to reverse balding or cancer or dementia? No! Only a few years ago we could be entertained by Woody Allen’s Selig being convincingly inserted into historic events and Tom Hanks, as Forrest Gump, showing up and interacting with famous filmic ghosts. We should not be seduced by the production values but worried about losing our grip on what once was a shared reality.

If democracy needs an informed electorate to flourish or even survive, what are our chances when any politician can be credibly shown to lie, to kill, to be drunk or violent? Even without AI and CGI, Hillary was depicted as sick, near death and carried to her car during her campaign against Trump—and Fox News. With AI, what can’t we distort? The Trump White House regularly releases AI-generated lies. It doesn’t just use normal and unfortunately normalized lies; it shows us visual lies which our eyes tell us to believe.

When WWII was coming to an end, General Eisenhower encouraged the filming of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, because he believed this would make the horrors of the holocaust undeniable. His belief today seems naive. Despite the film, Holocaust denial started much before AI. But now with AI, we can create credible yet false depictions of events that never happened and show positive proof that regular history got it wrong.

I’m not talking about stupid falsifications like Trump putting up signs at the Smithsonian telling people that the museum is lying. His whitewashing will fail. However, what won’t fail is AI’s bipartisan undermining of the social convention we used to call our shared reality.
Consider the irony that now, when we are insisting that police and ICE agents have bodycams to show us if the first official stories are true or fabrications, the images can quickly be made to show us what didn’t happen.

Yes, AI may take our jobs. It could turn on us and convince itself that we humans are incompetent to run the world, then label us redundant and set us out to pasture or to perish. Yes, this could happen, but we really won’t know since reality will have long since been replaced by prejudice, opinion, conspiracies and alternate (not) facts but realities. In our news silos and bubbles, fixated on our algorithmically determined personal feeds, we will become isolated and powerless.

Is it already too late to stop this bending of reality past both its and our breaking point? No. Not yet. But soon. As Hamlet said of death, “if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” We are not ready.