17:03This Is Boring But It Will Make You Scary Intelligent
Swadia refuses the usual line that AI is making everyone stupid and argues the real problem is verification: in a world where a lie can be manufactured to look exactly like the truth, judgment is the last scarce skill. He walks five distortions that hijack it, three from outside (authority, selling, consensus) and two from inside (what AI tells you, what you want to be true), and gives one usable tool for each. The cases are real and checkable: the Arup finance employee who insisted on a video call and sent $25 million to a room of deepfakes, Theranos raising $700 million behind a board of statesmen who knew nothing about blood, the Asch line experiment, and the MIT Media Lab study where the ChatGPT group could not quote an essay they had just written. The tools are five sentences, four of them questions, and three of them are prompts that put AI in the adversary's seat rather than the oracle's. It closes on a monk's image: the fog is not lifting, so drive slower.