How Zombie Values Infect Society

• Zombie Value #1: The answer to bad speech is more speech. When we first articulated the concept of free speech, there wasn’t a lot of content, and distributing a message was difficult. Now it’s relatively easy to get a message out into the world, but there’s so much content that it’s hard to parse and absorb. In a world where not everything is worth listening to, could we rank information using a synthesis model that helps us understand what to act on?
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• Zombie Value #2: In a world flooded with false information, the solution is fact checking.  A world based on fact checking is, of course, an improvement to our world of the past that was based on yellow journalism and hearsay. But in the era of ChatGPT, people can create convincing fact patterns that can persuade in one direction or another. Facts could be technically true, but violate the spirit of a truth-seeking environment. Instead of asking just whether something is true, we could ask whether it is true, truthful and representative. 
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• Zombie Value #3: Informed consent is required. People should be asked for consent before coming to certain experiences. But what if the context inside of which consent is given is manipulated? For example, do you really think about whether you want to allow cookies when you’re trying to find an address and get out the door? We need defaults that have our best interests at heart. 
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• Zombie Value #4: Everything should be democratized. It sounds right to say we should be democratizing power into more and more hands, especially those who haven’t had access to that privileged power in the past. However, if we democratize access to biological weapons, for example, or the ability to hack security vulnerabilities in infrastructure like power plants, would the outcome be acceptable? 
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• Zombie Value #5: People have agency over their willpower when making choices. It’s important that we take responsibility for our choices, but this view can miss power asymmetries. If TikTok has a supercomputer trained on what hundreds of millions of humans click on, is it really about “willpower” when you keep using that app?

Is the First Amendment Obsolete?

This essay explores free expression challenges

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The Wisdom Gap

This blog post from the Center for Humane Technology describes the gap between the rising interconnected complexity of our problems and our ability to make sense of them

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