There is much talk these days about living in an age of unprecedented ignorance.
I do not believe that.
I think there has always been a vast majority of people who are voluntarily ignorant. They live comfortably inside their little bubbles of understanding and, for the most part, have no desire to look outside them. This is not a new phenomenon created by smartphones, social media or artificial intelligence. It is an old human habit.
Winston Churchill famously observed that the strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Whether Churchill actually said it in precisely that form is almost beside the point. The sentiment certainly was not invented in the digital age. The problem of an uninformed, easily distracted electorate was already acute after the Second World War.
The Romans understood it perfectly.
Panem et circenses.
Bread and games.
Keep the masses fed and entertained. Give them something to watch. Keep them occupied. Because an idle, angry crowd can become a mob, and mobs are fickle things. They are also astonishingly ignorant.
This has been a feature of humanity for as long as we have learned to live in organised societies larger than a small tribe in the jungle.
There is a reason people filter out most of what surrounds them. It helps them cope with life.
Reality is difficult. It is beige, repetitive and frequently dull. It is also complicated, contradictory and full of things that cannot be reduced to a convenient explanation. Sometimes it appears dangerous when, in fact, it is merely unfamiliar. Sometimes it offers no answer at all.
And above everything else, reality gives rise to quiet.
The quiet is uncomfortable.
For many people, it is almost impossible simply to sit with it. They need stimulation, noise, distraction, certainty, outrage, entertainment or somebody else telling them what they are supposed to think. Not necessarily because they are stupid, but because sustained attention to reality is exhausting. It demands that one remain uncomfortable for longer than most people are willing to tolerate.
None of this began with artificial intelligence.
Nor did it begin with social media.
They merely changed the scale and visibility of the phenomenon.
For most of human history, an ignorant person could be ignorant rather privately. His ignorance might extend no further than his village, his workplace, his family or the people unfortunate enough to sit next to him at the pub.
Now he can broadcast it to millions.
And, more importantly, the system can amplify it.
The digital world did not manufacture the ignorant. It removed many of the barriers that once kept ignorance relatively local. Social media gave everybody a public square. Algorithms discovered that outrage holds attention. AI will make the production and distribution of confidently expressed nonsense cheaper still.
That is not the creation of a new human pathology.
It is the industrialisation of an old one.
The uncomfortable conclusion is therefore that we should stop blaming the latest technology for something humanity has been doing for thousands of years.
AI did not make people ignorant.
Social media did not make them ignorant.
They simply made the ignorance visible—and gave the ignorant a voice.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/08/14/artificial-ignorance-the-political-falsehoods-of-leading-ais/