Trust? In An Age of AI?!
February 18, 2026·0 comments·zg
I took part in an Epsilon Theory Office Hours last Friday.* Adam Butler and his piece “The Strip-Mining of Trust” were on the discussion block, and Ben Hunt had asked Adam, Dave Nadig, Brent Donnelly, and myself to specifically come weigh in.
The underlying feeling of the conversation, which Dave has since written about, Brent has been a regular voice of reason on, and Ben has since tweeted about, is:
Nobody reads anybody’s writing anymore and is there even a reason to?
Adam broke down the layers of trust and decisions being automated and automatically eroded at all levels of society right now. I wish it was science fiction. I halfway wish, but am also partway happy, that my wife and I re-watched Battlestar Galactica last year as a “what’s it mean to be human, really” reminder.
As a writer of many, many words, I’ve been feeling this for a while. I’ve never really gone in on chasing subscriber growth or reaching a massive audience via writing. I kind of assumed, in my post-blogger acceptance of starting to write online around 8 years ago, that I missed the ship, and it was only and always mostly going to be for myself.
If people found it and liked it - cool, but this was my attempt to have a complete thought once per day.
That’s all I needed.
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