The Digital Contrarian

TDC 054: How AI Breaks Shared Reality

• Ryan Levesque • Episode 54

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#054: The Breakdown of Shared Reality: AI's Most Dangerous Unintended Consequence

Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton warns that AI-driven personalization is destroying our collective understanding of what's real.

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Digital Contrarian, host Ryan Levesque dives into the breakdown of shared reality caused by AI-driven hyper-personalization and its profound implications for business and society.

You'll learn why isolated algorithmic realities undermine strategic thinking, discover the concept of the "Promethean Transition" we're navigating, and find how to choose between being a tunnel digger or pathfinder in our AI future.

Question of the Day 🗣️

Are you building your strategy on isolated AI-generated information or seeking out shared human experiences?

Key Take-aways

  • Hyper-personalized feeds create isolated realities that destroy our shared understanding
  • AI fabrications are impossible to verify when you're the only person seeing the response
  • Strategic blindness results from building business decisions on distorted data bubbles
  • The Promethean Transition requires preparing for multiple potential AI futures
  • Pathfinders seek shared experiences while tunnel diggers retreat into echo chambers

Timestamped Outline ⏱️

00:00 – The breakdown of shared reality and something special coming soon
00:03 – My 72-hour water fast and the clarity it provided
01:36 – The loss of shared experience
01:43 – Geoffrey Hinton's warning: The breakdown of shared reality
03:39 – Hyper-personalization's strategic blind spot
05:04 – ChatGPT's fabrications: Can you spot the real interview?
05:37 – The Promethean Transition we're navigating
07:43 – Tunnel Diggers vs. Pathfinders: Two responses to AI
09:18 – How I'm preparing my own kids for multiple futures
09:41 – A special opportunity coming to my Vermont farm

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Credits

Host: Ryan Levesque
© 2025 RL & Associates LLC. All rights reserved.

The breakdown of shared reality and something special coming soon. Earlier this week I completed a 72 hour water fast which if you're curious I wrote about in much more detail around some of the more interesting physiological and psychological effects. I'll make sure that we include a link to that piece with this episode. 

And what struck me most wasn't just the mental reset that this fast provided, it was how stepping away from a daily routine can create such a profound level of clarity around the most important thing to focus on next, which I'll talk a little bit more about in just a moment. Now it's never a perfect time to do a fast like this, but Tyleen and the boys are currently visiting family in Texas while Blue and I hold down the fort here at the farm. And the time alone here not only gave me the space for this fast, it also gave me the space to digest 25 one-on-one conversations that I had with readers of The Digital Contrarian who generously provided feedback on the table of contents of my upcoming book, Return to Real.

Like a crazy person I scheduled these 25 conversations back to back to back between client calls over two jam-packed six-hour days and then like a crazy person as soon as they were finished I jumped into this 72 hour fast. But each of these conversations which touched upon our collective future in the era of AI confirmed something crucial in the process. Beneath all the differing viewpoints and reactions around AI, even among those of us together here in this community, there's an underlying fracture emerging as we speak. 

The loss of shared experience. Let me explain. The breakdown of shared reality. 

The Nobel Prize winning Geoffrey Hinton, often described as the godfather of AI, recently raised the alarm on what he calls the unintended consequence of AI-driven personalization. And that is the complete breakdown of shared human experience. What he's referring to is this. 

We no longer watch the same six o'clock evening news on TV as a shared culture. We no longer read the same newspaper delivered to our doorstep as a shared society. Instead we largely live in our own hyper-personalized online feeds, each as unique as a fingerprint. 

And due to the increasing use of AI to deliver these experiences, we're now increasingly isolated within personalized echo chambers and living in separate algorithmic realities which is fundamentally distorting our collective understanding of what's actually happening in the world. And this isn't merely technological in nature. It has biological implications as well. 

As I'm exploring in Return to Real, Hinton explains that when we stop sharing a shared common reality, our ability to trust, to empathize, and to collaborate falls apart. On a neural level, our brains are literally being reprogrammed into isolated realities. And tragically, our capacity for collaboration is dying in the process. 

And as a contributor to the field of hyper-personalized digital experiences, i.e. in the form of survey funnels and quiz funnels, the unintended consequences of this dystopian endgame version is something that I admittedly didn't have the foresight to imagine when I first entered this space two decades ago. But now that I see it playing out in real time, the second and third order effects that it's having on the world has me deeply concerned right now. Hyper-personalization's strategic blind spot.

Personalization has always been the holy grail of digital marketing, yet Hinton's work underscores a crucial and overlooked downside. And that is, the isolation that tailored experiences online creates actually weakens our ability to spot strategic risks and opportunities clearly. To put it in other words, hyper-personalization undermines our ability to distinguish fact from fiction. 

And with chat GPT, or Clode, or Gemini, or DeepSeek, or whatever gen AI tool that you're using right now, the effects are even worse. So for example, let's say when you're served an AI generated answer to a question you're posed. How do you know for certain that what your AI is telling you is real, when you are the only person on this planet seeing that exact response? By the way, this is why it's never been more important to have an outside human voice, whether that's in the form of a trusted strategic advisor, or a mastermind group of peers to help you read the proverbial label when you're inside the model. 

Because in business, the cost of isolated reality isn't just social, it's effectively a form of strategic blindness. You can't build a resilient, adaptable strategy in your business if your understanding of your market and the world is fundamentally distorted by an isolated, inaccurate data bubble that gives you a false sense of reality. Perfect example of this, I recently asked chat GPT to help analyze the transcripts from my reader interviews this week. 

One of these three people that I share with you here is real. But the other two, chat GPT completely made up. So take a look. 

Can you guess which is which? And by the way, while we're at it, what percentage of what Gen AI feeds you do you think is made up? And that takes us to navigating the so-called Promethean transition. We're living through right now what can be described as the Promethean transition, a seismic shift driven by the AI revolution, economic uncertainty, and profound social restructuring. Now, what do I mean by Promethean? Well, because like Prometheus, who in Greek mythology, as you may remember, stole fire from the gods and gave humanity the transformative yet perilous power of technology, we stand at a similar crossroads today. 

Prometheus' gift was a double-edged sword. It granted humanity the extraordinary capabilities that come with fire and technology, but it also came with profound risks and consequences, forcing us to grapple with our own ambition and responsibility. Just as Prometheus' gift carried the potential to liberate or destroy, so too does AI possess this duality. 

And with AI already capable of its own procreation, yep, that's right, it's already replicating itself by writing its own self-directed code autonomously, humanity finds itself quickly losing control of its creation and wrestling with a profound existential question. Will we figure out how to master this technology or will this technology figure out how to master us first? Faced with this Promethean dilemma, I'm finding that most reactions to the bigger questions surrounding AI fall into one of the following three buckets. Painfully ignorant, foolishly optimistic, or cripplingly fearful. 

Each approach leaves you massively unprepared and vulnerable. Now what I'm advocating for is a much more comprehensive, albeit somewhat contrarian, path forward. One that involves making a series of strategic moves in your life which best prepare you for multiple potential futures in front of us.

Because the reality is this, nobody knows exactly what the future is going to bring us right now. And whenever that's the case, the best approach is to hedge. In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing here on our farm. 

Which brings us to tunnel diggers versus pathfinders. We can debate AI trends, tactics, and strategies all day, but let's be absolutely clear here, ignoring what's coming is not an option. Lean in or be left out. 

But right now millions of people are doing just that. They're ignoring what's coming. Millions are effectively slipping into their echo chambers, tunneling further beneath the surface, quietly numbing themselves with their fragmented realities.

I call these isolationists tunnel diggers. Fearfully retreating, desperately hoarding their resources, foolishly doing far too little right now. The problem with tunnels is eventually they reach a dead end or worse, they collapse. 

But there's good news, because there is an alternative move, a courageous and intentional choice, and one that's still available to all of us, at least right now. And that is the way of the pathfinder. Unlike tunnel diggers, pathfinders bravely stick their head above the surface, navigate toward the scary and the unknown, and venture beyond the of their ordinary world. 

They recognize that resilience is born from taking risks and from seeking out other pathfinders. They understand the power of gathering face-to-face, cultivating shared experiences, and piecing together collective wisdom to turn uncertainty into shared advantage. Because one thing is for certain, the future belongs to the brave and the bold.

And now is the time to unite, which brings me to a special opportunity. I believe this is exactly why I'm feeling such a deep calling to help others navigate this massive transition that is in front of us right now. It's why I'm preparing my own kids, not only by teaching them business and finance and how to leverage AI, but by also showing them how to hedge by developing tangible skills like farming, building, and self-reliance. 

Now I can't reveal all the details just yet, but I'm putting together something special on our farm and homestead here in Vermont, an intimate face-to-face experience, part mastermind, part adventure. And most importantly, a chance to step away from the day-to-day digital distraction of your life and move deliberately toward collaboration, toward connection, and toward clarity in your business in this new AI world. To find the signal amidst the noise. 

Now space will be very limited, so what that means is this. If this is something you have energy around being part of, send me an email to let me know. Preference will be given to those who express early interest. 

But in the meantime, stay tuned because I'll be providing more details on everything that I've mentioned and more very, very soon. Now in the meantime, if you enjoyed this video or it's helped make you think, be sure to like, be sure to follow, be sure to subscribe to be notified when the next video in this series drops. And in the meantime, I have another episode that I think you might enjoy that goes even deeper into some of the ideas around AI that we explored together in this piece.

Okay, I'll leave you with that for now. As always, remember to hug the ones you love, and I'll see you again in the next episode.