By Charles Hugh Smith
OfTwoMinds.com
July 6, 2026
The possibility that AI will end up unleashing waves of 'Anti-Progress'-malicious uses, untrustworthy output and uncontrollable floods of slop-also doesn't occur to those confined in the current belief construct.
A funny thing happens on the way to understanding risk: we discover it's tricky. We think we see all the risks, and think we can mitigate or hedge those risks, but by its very nature, risk evades such simplistic filters and metrics. Risk remains hidden, offscreen, invisible, building up out of sight, awaiting a catalyst that's equally undetectable until it manifests, and after the fact, we look back and ask, why didn't we see that coming?
Risk is tricky like that. It can lay dormant for decades and then erupt with little warning.
Risk is tricky in other ways. In our hubris, we see the power and might of our technologies, systems and foresight, and reckon these are so robust they will easily survive any tectonic shift, as we've planned for emergencies.
But our faith in the might of our civilization is itself a source of risk because the risk of Model Collapse-the breakdown not of a supply chain or technology but of our entire conceptual construct of how the world works-goes unrecognized because our confidence that our model maps the real world is so high that we are incapable of recognizing its drift into hallucination and civilizational psychosis.
In other words, our confidence that our conceptual mythologies are accurately mapping the real world is itself a source of civilizational risk because this confidence makes it inevitable that we do more of what's failing, as the alternative-recognizing our conceptual models and mythologies are self-serving rationalizations that substitute artifice for realistic appraisals-is conceptually and emotionally impossible.