Follow the Quiet Voices to Find AI's Truths

When turmoil begins, the wise, called upon, retreat to the peace within

Photo by Kristina Flour

AI is popular. Something to have a stance on. “Did you hear they gave the Nobel prizes of physics and chemistry to AI guys, crazy right?” “Wow, the Tesla event yesterday was something—don’t you think?” You better think something, anything. Nothing’s worse than impartiality by ignorance. That’s AI now, like politics. Hesitate and people will assume your side for you; “if you’re not with me you’re my enemy.” Controversy rules. There’s division even if you want to sum.

Naturally, as with all divisive stuff, AI has given birth to opposing groups—pro-AI and anti-AI people. They’re thesis and antithesis. They despise each other more than they care about AI (or themselves), like hooligans cheering for their team as an excuse to get drunk on anger and hatred (metaphorically and literally).

In fairness to the people who identify with the labels but don’t share all the defining traits, I should draft a detailed taxonomy (I won’t, it’s beyond my scope, but know that I’m sensitive to such internal differences). There’s a hidden complexity, full of color and texture, to how people relate to one or the other group. Only a tiny minority reaches fanatic levels of allegiance.

Anyway, I’ve chosen a unidimensional classification—pro vs anti—for simplicity. And because today it doesn’t matter, it’s not those groups I care about. Today is not a day of judgment but of redemption.

Today, I explore the missing synthesis—the people who belong in the interstices of standard modern behavior (i.e., either being passionately opinionated or passionately agreeable about everything). The synthetical thinkers dwell in the gaps others leave, amidst the shouting, the insults, the blocking, and the occasional hasty amend. Right now, in AI, they’re nowhere to be found.

Don’t confuse this with “being in the middle.” It’s not bothsidesism. There are plenty of fake, 50-50-fashion people-pleasing phonies. And they’re not precisely quiet.

Syntheticals don’t see AI—the field, the technology, the practices, the products—as monolithic or a perfect dualism. They see a whole composed of many parts that can be examined in isolation. To them, AI—like everything else—is a puzzle that defies binaries, even splits, forced concessions, or any other rules humans make up to impose order. This way of thinking creates apparent conflict for those who can’t keep unbalanced contrasting ideas in mind—the partisan pawns and the agreeable phonies.

Syntheticals squarely clash with the official narrative, i.e., you can’t be pro-AI in some areas and anti-AI in others. Pawns of their faction are tied—strictly, unwaveringly—to a tangled mess of immiscible ideas.

Syntheticals also clash with the agreeable crowd, whose every sentence is “AI is good but also bad” or “AI is bad but also good.” To them, positives and negatives must cancel one another; if you want to opine, you better find a convenient trade-off.

Ugh. I can’t stand people who think as a function of the consequences of their thinking.

Syntheticals accept the bad things and the better things. However much of each there is. They perceive the world, to the best of their ability, as it shows itself, which happens to be an undecipherable mix of good and evil. They’re dedicated to the arduous task of making sense of the inscrutable hieroglyphics that describe how AI will affect us.

In terms of identity, they don’t exist in favor of something or in opposition. They do favor and oppose stuff but aren’t defined by that. They don’t obey the pulling of the masses or seek the high of resisting it. They move, like photons, free of mass to be attracted by the gravitas of the consensus. As carefree agents, they casually enter and exit the forum, dressed in views that align with nothing and can be labeled as nothing. They listen to everyone, tolerant. Then they draw their own conclusions according to their priors and the data, mostly unsullied from sectarian quarrels.

Synthetical thinkers care, foremost, about truth. They pursue truth and when it comes to it, they don’t make compromises. That’s why everyone else hates them. So they hide.

That’s what I love about them. They don’t experience the urge to compensate their views when they feel they’re extreme for the public opinion or, at times, right out of the Overton window. If you looked at the entire history of things they’ve said you would find, averaged across time, a natural calibration—a sensibleness to it—but at any given time they will choose to speak their mind, without moderation, however disparaging their thoughts may sound out loud.

This contrasts with people attuned to the unidimensional spectrum, who will unapologetically shill for their kin yet try to hide their inevitably biased stances by sprinkling a bit of “but” in their comments in a clumsy attempt to preemptively shut down any accusation of having vested motivations.

That was a revelation to me: angry fanatics and pleasing phonies are actually the same people. They take up each role depending on how much of their identity, reputation, or financial health is at stake.

The problem with the painfully honest synthetical group is that despite being often first to things—when no one else has a reason to care the only ones who care to reason are the truth seekers—they’re quiet in times of turmoil. They hide when they’re most needed. Like now.

But I get it. They hide from conflict not because they avoid it but because they wisely believe it quickly renders any argumentation unfruitful. Once a topic reaches sufficient notoriety to attract vermin, then discussion ensues, tribalism rules, and positioning at either extreme becomes paramount to partake in the conversation.

If you resist choosing a side—not because you lack opinion but because yours fits neither—you risk being shunned by both, despite being a foe to none. That’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way: when the stakes rise so high you can’t be a friend of truth. You’re either a friend of power or its enemy.

But there’s hope.

I have hope.

Nothing stays too long exposed to sunlight without burning out. AI is no different. The time will come when it’s no longer shiny but depleted of gloss; no longer a matter about which to have an opinion, for or against. It will just be. Uninteresting, unspoiled, unburdened by the layers and layers of twisted incentives behind today’s discourse.

And then, on one good day that I will celebrate, the synthetical thinkers—the truth-seekers—will come back. I am sure. I am sure because they aren’t the mysterious strangers I’ve made them to be.

They are, in fact, none other than the better version of ourselves.