Unfortunately it is not like human society in history had truth as the highest virtue.
Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e. rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.
Edit: See Roko's Basilisk as an example. wherein something like variation on Christian hell is independently reinvented for those not donating enough to bring about the coming superhuman AGI, who will therefore punish you- or the closest simulation it can spin up in VR if you're long gone- for all eternity. The infinite negative EV far outweighing any positive EV of doing more than subsist in poverty. Even managed to work in that it could be a reluctant, but otherwise benevolent super AI such that, while benevolent, it wanted to exist, and to maximize its chances it bound itself to a promise in the future to do these things as an incentive for people to get it to exist.
I mean, Archimedes stands out because he searched for the truth and documented it. I'm sure most people on the planet at that time would have burned you for being a witch, or whatever fabled creature was in vogue at the time.
Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace, with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid that the business will fail or get outpaced by a competitor if we are not "using AI." Keep in mind this is a small 300 employee, non-tech company with no real local competitors.
Asking for clarification or what they mean by "use AI" they have no answers, just "other companies are going to use AI, and we need to use AI or we will fall behind."
There's no strategy or technical merit here, no pre-defined use case people have in mind. Purely driven by hype. We do in fact use AI. I do, the office workers use it daily, but the reality is it has had no outward/visible effect on profitability, so it doesn't show up on the P&L at the end of the quarter except as an expense, and so the hype and mandate continues. The only thing that matters is appearing to "use AI" until the magic box makes the line go up.
> This is existential. If we aren't early adopters of AI tools we will be left behind and will never catch up.
This company is dominant in the space they operate in. The magnitude of the delusion is profound. Ironically, this crap is actually distracting and affects quality, so it could affect competitiveness--just not how they hope.