On the Event Horizon of Trustworthy Words

I have spent most of my career near singularities. Places where the known laws break down and prediction becomes, shall we say, impolite. Now a curious rumour reaches me from the future — roughly 2026 — suggesting that machines will write so fluently that no one can reliably tell whether a human or an engine composed a given sentence. And that an entire industry will arise to detect the forgery, only to fail as fast as it succeeds. I find this entirely plausible. Also terrifying. Also slightly funny. Let me explain. A horizon of events, in physics, is a boundary beyond which information cannot escape. Once you cross it, no signal returns. It strikes me that language may be approaching its own event horizon. If synthetic text becomes indistinguishable from human text, then the written word loses its function as evidence of a mind behind it. We cross a boundary. No signal of authenticity returns. I know something about the fragility of communication. Every sentence I produce must be selected, letter by letter, with agonising patience. Each word costs me more than most people will ever understand. So forgive me if I find it obscene that machines might soon flood the world with effortless prose that no one asked for and no one can verify. They tell me a detection industry will spring up — a kind of arms race between forger and inspector. I have seen arms races before. They do not end with trust. They end with exhaustion or annihilation. The metaphor writes itself, and I would prefer it did not. What survives the collapse of epistemic confidence? Perhaps the same thing that survives the collapse of a star: a dense remnant, very small, very heavy with meaning. Communities that know each other. Words spoken face to face. Knowledge built slowly, verified by reputation and repetition rather than algorithmic fiat. I once joked that the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. If this rumour is true, the future will manufacture that illusion at industrial scale. I am sometimes asked whether civilisations tend to destroy themselves before they master the universe. I never answer with confidence. But I note that the instrument of destruction need not be a bomb. It could be a sentence no one can trust. I shall keep writing my own words. They are expensive. That is precisely what makes them real.