AI: The End or Beginning of Knowledge?
Source: ChatGPT
Are we witnessing the death of verifiable knowledge, or its most spectacular rebirth? Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in 1989 that liberal democracy represented "the end of history"—the final form of human government after defeating fascism and communism.¹ He was spectacularly wrong. Rather than peaceful democratic convergence, we got 9/11, the Iraq War, the rise of China, Putin's authoritarianism, and Trump's populist revolt. Fukuyama himself later admitted he didn't appreciate how "once you became a modern democracy, you could also go backwards."²
His error offers a lesson for today's AI moment: Beware of declaring any "end" to human development.
The pessimists have compelling evidence about AI threatening knowledge integrity. New artificial intelligence tools make it cheap, easy, and fast to create convincing fake video, audio, and text, as NPR reported before the 2024 election.³ Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist at NYU, warns: "Anybody who wants to do this stuff... can make more of it at very little cost."⁴ Professor Ethan Mollick demonstrated this by creating a deepfake video of himself in eight minutes for just $11.⁵
The implications are staggering. Domestic and foreign adversaries can use deepfakes and other forms of generative AI to spread false information, according to Carnegie Mellon researchers.⁶ In February 2024, a finance worker in Hong Kong was tricked into paying $25 million based on a Zoom meeting where all participants were deepfakes.⁷ According to one poll, 65% of respondents said election misinformation had gotten worse since 2020.⁸
But here's where it gets hopeful.
While AI threatens knowledge integrity, it's simultaneously supercharging knowledge creation. For example, AlphaFold 2's success in protein structure prediction achieved unprecedented accuracy, scoring above 90 on CASP's global distance test for approximately two-thirds of the proteins.⁹ AlphaFold has now predicted over 200 million protein structures—nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, potentially saving millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of years in research time.¹⁰
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized this breakthrough.¹¹ Venki Ramakrishnan called it "a stunning advance on the protein folding problem," adding that "It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted."¹² AlphaFold 3 shows at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods.¹³
The World Economic Forum identifies AI for scientific discovery as a top emerging technology.¹⁴ Google's AI co-scientist system has already validated drug repurposing predictions for acute myeloid leukemia.¹⁵
Interestingly, despite fears of a "deepfake apocalypse," less than 1% of all fact-checked misinformation during the 2024 election cycle was AI content, according to Meta.¹⁶ The feared disruption hasn't materialized—yet.
Like Fukuyama's premature declaration, predicting AI will end knowledge—whether by destroying truth or perfecting discovery—likely misses the messy, unpredictable reality ahead. We suspect we're at both an end and beginning: the end of an era where truth was harder to fabricate, and the dawn of one where knowledge can be created faster than ever before.
The real challenge isn't choosing between human and artificial intelligence, but learning to distinguish between AI that illuminates truth and AI that obscures it.
Notes
¹ The Conversation, "The End of History: Francis Fukuyama's Controversial Idea Explained," November 16, 2022, https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-history-francis-fukuyamas-controversial-idea-explained-193225/
² New Statesman, "Francis Fukuyama: We Could Be Facing the End of 'the End of History'," October 12, 2023, https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2022/03/francis-fukuyama-on-the-end-of-the-end-of-history/
³ NPR, "AI Deepfakes Could Advance Misinformation in the Run Up to the 2024 Election," March 26, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166114364/ai-deepfakes-could-advance-misinformation-in-the-run-up-to-the-2024-election/
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College, "Voters: Here's How to Spot AI 'Deepfakes' That Spread Election-Related Misinformation," October 2024, https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2024/October/voters-heres-how-to-spot-ai-deepfakes-that-spread-election-related-misinformation1/
⁷ World Economic Forum, "Deepfakes Are Here to Stay and We Should Remain Vigilant," January 2025, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/deepfakes-different-threat-than-expected/
⁸ Union of Concerned Scientists, "Meta Ends Fact-Checking, Raising Risks of Disinformation to Democracy," February 4, 2025, https://blog.ucs.org/liza-gordon-rogers/meta-ends-fact-checking-raising-risks-of-disinformation-to-democracy/
⁹ Wikipedia, "AlphaFold," May 1, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold.
¹⁰ Google DeepMind, "AlphaFold - Google DeepMind," accessed July 1, 2025, https://deepmind.google/technologies/alphafold/
¹¹ Nobel Prize Organization, "Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024," 2024, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/
¹² Wikipedia, "AlphaFold."
¹³ Google DeepMind, "AlphaFold - Google DeepMind."
¹⁴ World Economic Forum, "AI for Scientific Discovery - Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024," 2024, https://www.weforum.org/publications/top-10-emerging-technologies-2024/in-full/1-ai-for-scientific-discovery/
¹⁵ Google Research, "Accelerating Scientific Breakthroughs with an AI Co-Scientist," June 3, 2025, https://research.google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakthroughs-with-an-ai-co-scientist/
¹⁶ World Economic Forum, "Deepfakes Are Here to Stay and We Should Remain Vigilant."
Bibliography
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