The same percentage (28%) of Americans believe in Bigfoot as trust the media.1 Their distrust is not misplaced. Journalism schools are hothouses of progressive claptrap. They attract students from the bottom deciles who harbor illusions of adequacy and who don’t have enough chlorine in their gene pools.
In recent polls 25% of Americans self-identify as progressive; their beliefs are based on religion and are thus impervious to facts or logic. Fact checking sources such as PolitiFact and Snopes shill for the far left. America needs an accurate nonpolitical source of fact. Fortunately, for the remaining 75% of us, deliverance is on the way.
I have blogged several times about how America could use Fair Witnesses or Mentats. We are on the cusp of super intelligence (“SI”) that can achieve the same results.
Fair Witness
Fair Witness is a creation of Robert Heinlein in his 1961 blockbuster sci-fi classic, Stranger in a Strange Land.2 It is set in a milieu of an overbearing government (sound familiar?). The only way citizens could counter the overweening power of the state was to hire a Fair Witness – a specially trained person so truthful and objective as to be unimpeachable. Fair Witnesses wore distinctive white robes and were accorded deferential treatment by society, government and courts.
Although the Fair Witness concept was only a small obscure part of a book published 65 years ago, it has nearly 100 million internet searches. Clearly, people are desperate for a reliable way to separate fact from fiction, truth from spin and political claims from objective reality.
Mentat
Created by sci-fi author Frank Herbert (Dune series), Mentats were trained to develop their cognitive and analytic capacities to unimaginable heights. Mentats possessed eidetic memories and were the embodiment of logic and reason. It is thus a recurring sci-fi theme that society desires accurate impartial arbiters of ascertainable facts.
Super Intelligence
Based on 100,000,000 internet searches, it is safe to conclude that Americans (or at least 75% of them) are desperate for a source of truth. There is no reason SI cannot become the fulfillment and embodiment of Fair Witnesses and Mentats. It would be entirely appropriate to name the first such SI application Fair Witness.
Fair Witness SI would destroy progressivism, which is based on spin, lies and maskirovka. Their running dogs in the media no longer could get away with blatant bias.
Imagine the possibilities. A Fair Witness SI app would trump public debate about any issue that lends itself to objective proof. It would be the death knell for progressivism which is based on lies, spin and maskirovka. Suddenly, being untruthful would become counterproductive. SI would even make the media more circumspect as any attempt to deceive, such as biased reporting, could be instantly debunked.
The current state of SI is not yet ready for Fair Witness, although it is close enough to savor the possibilities. I have tested Gemini, Copilot, Grok and ChatGpt with queries about hot button political issues. In most cases, the results represented improvement from the standard progressive narrative, but still included content based on questionable data, which I assume is due to the preponderance of such source data relied upon by SI. Nonetheless, we are tantalizingly close.
Thanks to Heinlein and Hubert
We have much to learn from science fiction. Like all great sci-fi, Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune speak to us today. A Fair Witness SI would bring about a seismic shift in politics, media and advertising. We are within a few short years of achieving the results first advanced by Heinlein and Herbert six decades ago. No longer will 28% of Americans believe in Bigfoot and we may even have media we can trust.
The next post will be November 1 and will reveal my Fearless Forecast for the election.
Per 2025 Gallup poll
It won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962.
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