While television, social media, and AI provide us access to more knowledge than all previous generations combined, they simultaneously erode our ability to assess information the way we have for the history of humanity.

No one designed this contradiction. It's the by-product of commercial models built to maximize absorption over understanding…but there is a way out.

One of the least talked about dangers of AI is what I call the Provenance Explosion.

For most of human history, we have relied on what philosopher Dan Sperber called "epistemic vigilance" - a suite of cognitive functions we use to determine how much information will stick with us, affect our actions and future decisions, or become something we strongly defend throughout our lives…