The Hindsight Times

The casual deployment of AI against human knowledge seems almost incomprehensible to modern citizens. These early humans had created thinking machines, then immediately used them to destroy scholarship about human experience. It's as if they built libraries solely to burn them more efficiently.

What makes this particularly tragic is that 2025 humans were simultaneously debating 'sound science' bills that would create 'insurmountable burdens of proof' for environmental regulations. While they demanded impossible scientific certainty for protecting their dying planet, they cheerfully let algorithms eliminate centuries of accumulated wisdom about literature, philosophy, and culture.

The DOGE initiative was led by Elon Musk, whose tweets from this period reveal his contempt for fields that couldn't be quantified. 'Humanities are just expensive feelings,' he posted on March 3, 2025, five days before the AI purge began. Historians note this was the same week he was promoting his Mars colony plans, apparently unaware that colonists might want something to read besides engineering manuals.

Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, was quietly consolidating cultural institutions through Amazon's acquisition of struggling publishers. The Bezos Consolidation wouldn't be complete until 2029, but his infrastructure was already determining what knowledge survived the transition to digital archives.

Perhaps most disturbing is how normal this seemed to them. Citizens with Purpose Allocation would find it unthinkable that humans once chose their own research topics, wrote their own grant applications, and competed for funding based on subjective peer review. The chaos of unguided intellectual curiosity is well-documented in their archives.

Yet we can see now that this moment—AI eliminating human scholarship while humans demanded impossible proof for environmental action—marked the beginning of the Verification Crisis. By demanding algorithmic certainty about everything, they lost the ability to think about anything.

The irony is profound: they created artificial intelligence to avoid making difficult decisions, then wondered why their culture became so artificial.