The social dilemma 🏙️
- Chaitanya Joshi
- Mar 21
- 6 min read
Updated: 22 hours ago
This day and age we are all busy juggling 100 tasks while our attention is splintered into 1000 fragments. The depth and complexities of life (your and everyone's) - let alone the experience of truly living it - seem to have no place in our rushed conclusions and polarized interactions. I am no exception my self. What's particularly troubling is how my generation, despite (or perhaps because of) this shallow engagement with life's complexities, tends to form rigid, oversimplified conclusions - opinions carved in stone, resistant to nuance or reconsideration. Any argument that challenges the established position held by an individual, in most cases, is met by resistance driving the individual further into polarized positions rather than encouraging them for an open and critical debate.
On top of that , the AI-War has begun! This sounds dramatic, but we are officially into an era of AI and we have indeed rushed into unleashing artificial intelligence into our information domains. The impact of all these on the development of human consciousness and social fabric by extension, at least in near future, is scary. Let me elaborate - routine, predictable tasks are well-suited for current state of the art artificial intelligence. But when it comes to real knowledge or wisdom development? There's still something uniquely human that AI can't quite replicate yet, despite all its impressive capabilities. May be I am paranoid. May be every major technology shift felt the same - be it books, photography or movies, internet, or social media. This is a quote from ancient Rome -
So, I guess, my paranoia is a tribute to the old guards freaking out at the dawn of new horizon. Like a sweet tradition of anxiety.
However, there are some legitimate concerns here. The constant flood of bite-sized content on social media is bad enough for polarization, but now we're adding AI to the mix - AI that comes pre-loaded with existing biases and a power to whip up content unconstrained by reality, contextual grounding, or truth for that matter [1]. After all, what we're calling 'AI' is merely compressed information wrapped in curated personas created by various technology vendors. Take traditional learning, typically one absorbs contextual information - often ten pages before and after the specific content of interest, if not the entire book. Owing to this contextual grounding a knowledge-seeker is pushed to engage with multiple sources, a time consuming process that naturally instills wisdom through deliberate effort, reflection, and simply the unfolding of life. On the contrary, the combo of instant gratification of information and scale is probably going to make things worse for most people, pushing them even further away from diving into original content, analyzing context, and thinking deeply. Instead of "let me look into this further," we're heading toward a world of "here's what to think or feel." The scale and reach of this AI-Internet duo might just be the catalyst that imperialists, dictators, and every bad actor on global stage needs to increase chaos and erode social fabric. The young generation is particularly susceptible and this quote by Aristotle captures the affliction well -
“[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. … They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it."
The information packed into AI is just a snapshot of present and "available" history - wrapped in political correctness, narratives, and often pushes particular agendas rather than seeking deeper truths. It, thus, tends to be full of oversimplified views that miss life's nuances and real complexity. Here is what I mean about nuances - to put it in Mathematical-English, the world that we see, experience, and exist in is a complex system. A non-linear system at that. Life would have been incredibly simple if it were linear (proportional). If you do not have engineering background, simply put, if eating 3 grams sugar gives you 5 units of pleasure, then eating 3 ton sugar must give you 50 million units of pleasure. This is what linear thinking gets you. Thinking in non-linear terms, you end up with "it is complicated". And, while "eating sugar" is an obviously absurd example, it applies to liberty, tribalism, wealth, individualism, feminism, religion, affirmative action so on and so forth. Indeed, the material world and "clusters of human beings" form quite a complex non-linear system. It is incredibly hard to predict the long term or even near-long-term consequences of our actions or policy positions. We just don't have a precise model of this system. To make matters worse, these system have long drawn memories or perceived memories to be precise.
Now, for the other piece of information - the memory of the system or "history". In our politically charged world, history is at best a bad biased observational study. Someone is recording the events or literally making up the events to their taste, prejudices, and preferences. Also, you are at the mercy of chance discoveries and artifacts surviving the onslaught of environment and barbarians. There is no way we can generalize these observations or make causal conclusions, at least not to the high scientific rigor or standard. Of course , as is the case with every observational study, you can make some inferences. Or learn from it if you craft well meaning narratives.
![The pitfalls of using data to draw conclusion [2]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f085b1_3ee824c476ed48df80549aa022d18c57~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_592,h_311,al_c,q_80,enc_avif,quality_auto/f085b1_3ee824c476ed48df80549aa022d18c57~mv2.jpg)
This is where it gets tricky. Simple questions like - How many data points do you have? How reliable are these particular data points? Given a few of these data points you can weave almost any story. The real catalyst isn't the data - it's the underlying belief in the narrative. Once that belief takes root, it can be perpetually and superstitiously propagated. An entire ecosystem emerges: institutions form, research proliferates, and a self-reinforcing cycle of scholarship establishes itself. Consider, for example, the West's persistent narrative of having 'civilized the world.' This isn't just a story - it has become a deeply ingrained belief among Western societies and colonies alike, illustrating how powerful narratives can transform from interpretation to accepted truth. Or, in contemporary times, take the different/opposing political narratives created by the media houses using the same data points [3].
Take India, for example, to showcase the complexity of information, life, and the resulting chaos. India that is Bharat, is an ancient civilization. And at present, around 42.7% people in India are below 25 and the median age of Indian population is 28 [4]. To be very brief about recent history, the Islamic sultanate gave way to the Maratha Empire, before ultimately falling under the control of the British East India Company. The British rule in India was a devastating blow to the social, economical, and civilizational fabric of India [5]. Post 1947, Nehru led India on a socialist model [6]. The world was going through a cold war between the capitalistic ideas under the leadership of Unites States and the Marxist-Socialistic ideas under Soviet Union. In 1989, at Malta, the cold war came to an end. The US was clearly in a dominant position. In 1991 the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pursued India to open its market, and growing up we saw the impact of free market policies adopted by India under Manmohan Singh. Thus, India entered in an era of churn. The Abrahamic, Marxist-Socialist, Western-Capitalist, and Indian Civilizational ideas are in a tug of war in India. Forming unholy alliances at times and seeking dominance. And it is quite obvious that all players embody the "End justifies the means" adage.
As Jay W Forrester puts it on Mental Models in Systems Engineering,
“The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system.”
In a democratic framework, powers that be, are working hard to control and alter these "selected key concepts" and relationship between them - all through information and narrative warfare. So, in India, we have a long drawn memory, a considerably young population, and number of power hungry players trying to assert dominance. And into this combustible situation, we're about to throw the AI-Internet duo of instant gratification. What could go wrong? And this is not just about India. Similar trends are emerging across the globe. The degree of chaos varies depending upon the demographics, constitution, type of polity, per capita income and governance models.
You might question how and why does this matter—well, a stable social fabric remains the necessary condition of all meaningful progress. And wherever you seek refuge, this hell fire will inevitably reach you too. As a remedy, everyone must participate actively and avoid erosion of social fabric - promote depth in discourse and avoid weaponization of history and tools alike; apathy is not an option. If we continue to walk down this road of indifference and self-indulgent pleasure-seeking as a sole goal, neither cutting-edge products, trendy startups, nor the meaningless rotation of power between political factions and autocrats offer the liberation we crave. The state or union's ability to insulate you from consequences is already fading.
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