On Points of View in the Electrical Age and Beyond

People have exchanged their points of view for millennia. The value of doing so is not immediately obvious. The exchange of goods, labour or factual information carries immediate and obvious value, yet the exchange of points of view does not follow the same pattern. Yet it is undeniable that human beings consistently seek the perspectives of others.

The deeper reason might be that a point of view contains two parts of information which are linked, one is the factual information, something like ‘too much rain is bad for crops’, the other however is the reasoning done by the person conveying the point of view. It is a manifestation of reasoning under conditions of partial information, shaped by one's life, experiences, observations and circumstances. When one shares their point of view one shares not only what one knows but also how one arrived at their conclusion and how one interprets what one knows. Historically this made points of view enormously valuable. By comparing perspectives humans could access information that would otherwise remain permanently inaccessible to them. A farmer could learn practices from farmers miles away, a merchant from travellers arriving from distant lands, and a ruler from advisers exposed to vastly different circumstances. This exchange of points of view allowed humans to construct a picture of reality vastly more complete than any one human could have.

For most of human history information was scarce, local and unevenly distributed. Most individuals spent their entire lives within a narrow geographical and social environment. Their understanding of the world around them was naturally constrained by what they could directly witness and observe. Under such conditions the perspective of another person was often the only or one of a few methods available to expand one's understanding of the world. As an example consider two farmers living in neighbouring villages, one of whom consistently achieves much higher crop yields. The less successful of the two cannot directly and immediately determine why. The difference may stem from a multitude of factors, soil quality, livestock, weather patterns or technological differences in irrigation patterns. Yet by listening to the more successful farmer’s point of view he gains access to exactly the subset of factors the more successful farmer believes to be important in achieving higher yields. This is valuable not necessarily because the more successful farmer has developed modern farming practices but because it contains information and conclusions hidden from him. The value of a point of view was therefore proportional to the uniqueness of the information from which it emerged. Different lives produce different knowledge which in turn produces different perspectives and exchanging points of view was in a sense to exchange access to reality itself. Over time however this relationship began to change.

The invention of writing allowed information to persist beyond individual memory, books and printing further made it possible for this information to be spread both farther than previously possible but also to be spread faster than ever before. Inventions of the electrical age like telegraphs, telephones, radio and television reduced informational isolation at an ever accelerating pace. When one once required direct interaction with another human to access information one now could readily receive that information via the tools of the electrical age. The internet accelerated this development even further, knowledge that once was hidden in a small hamlet on how to grow a specific variety of grapes was now widely available to anyone interested. Everyone gained the ability to have access to the entirety of human knowledge, and therefore everyone could now use this factual information to reason about reality. As access to information expanded, the informational value of individual points of view declined. When two people possess access to largely the same facts, the significance of their different viewpoints changes. The question is no longer what the other party knows that I do not but instead it becomes how does the other party interpret what we both know.

The arrival of large language models and AI more broadly is a step even further along this path.

When the bottleneck in the internet age was curiosity and effort, finding the right result in a search and comparing it to other sources, that bottleneck no longer exists when the search is performed by an LLM that reads hundreds of sources within seconds and condenses the information into short paragraphs. This shift now lets anyone access information which would have otherwise taken substantial effort with essentially zero effort. This change has profound implications for the concept of a point of view. Historically, perspectives had value mainly because they reflected informational asymmetry. In a world where information becomes universally accessible and instantly retrievable, those asymmetries no longer exist. If two individuals can access the same books, the same research and the same synthesised summary, then their perspectives cease to reveal hidden information. What remains still is the reasoning process itself but the point of view no longer serves as a window into once hidden information, instead it's purely a window into someone else's way of thinking. In this sense, the age of artificial intelligence marks a transition from an epistemology of experience to an epistemology of access. For the first time in history knowledge is separable from personal experience, one can now learn without having to see, to experience, to travel or to endure. Knowledge today increasingly derives from the ability to retrieve information rather than personally encounter it.

As this transition accelerates the traditional value of a point of view begins to disappear.

For the sake of clarity, this does not mean that disagreement disappears, people will most likely continue to hold different moral commitments, preferences and values. However disagreement will mostly take the form of what ought to be done as opposed to what is true. These disagreements are of a different form however, they are about differing priorities and assumptions rather than from a lack of unequal access to information. The modern idea of celebrating everyone's perspective is therefore, to some extent at least, an artifact of an older informational environment. It reflects a world in which individuals genuinely possessed unique fragments of reality that others lacked and in such a world, exchanging points of view was one of the most effective methods of expanding one's understanding. The age of AI and LLMs challenges this assumption as when information becomes abundant and accessible with ease, the scarcity of information that once made points of view valuable begins to vanish. The value of a point of view declines because the informational asymmetry from which it emerged declines as well.

For most of human history, human beings needed one another's perspectives in order to understand the world. Increasingly however, they need one another only to decide what to do with the understanding they already possess.