[Rationality Under AI Mediation: Belief, Contestability, and the Loss of Shared Evidence]

Introduction

I was rejected for a job, and I have no way to determine why. The person I am arguing with online is probably a bot. The actress Tilly Norwood shakes up the movie industry, but she never existed [1]. The video evidence cited in the news may be fabricated [4]. My news is different than yours [5]. This is not speculation. This is Tuesday.

Here's what connects all of these: there's something between you and reality now. When you apply for a job, an algorithm screens you before any human sees your resume. When you check the news, a recommendation system decides what's real before you judge.

The technology was envisioned as a tool. But, we are operationalizing it as a mediator. We've given it the job of a.) telling us what the world is before we get to look at it ourselves, and b.) adjusting the world before we've had a chance to see it.

For thirty years we've been contemplating the singularity: the moment when AI becomes smarter than us, when technology accelerates beyond human control. We've been preparing for the arrival of superintelligence, hopeful of alignment, wondering if we'll merge with the machines or just be left behind. We're viewing this wrong.

The fascination with superintelligent AIs is causing us to miss a more immediate issue: the issue that AI is already eroding the foundations of human reality. This isn't because of its intelligence, or even alignment, it is because of its mediation. Even with perfect alignment, mediation still dissolves human frameworks.

Many of our epistemic, ontological, social, moral, and political frameworks are all based on a shared, contestable, and attributive relationship with reality. Our frameworks assume: You see the sun. You feel its warmth. You tell me what you saw. I can check. We share a world. From this foundation, we built everything else: accountability (you did it, I can trace it), shared truth (we saw the same thing), collective action (we all face the same reality).

However, by placing non-human minds between us and reality, we've broken the link. The mediator interprets before we perceive. It optimizes before we deliberate. It decides what's possible before we choose. We are allowing it to mediate our frameworks, our ontologies. Just to be clear: We invented an alien interpreter, routed the world through ...

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