People who know the most often sound the least certain
People who know the most often sound the least certain. Signal Over NoiseSubscribeSign inThe people who know the most often sound the least certainAI needs better storytellers.
What happened
The people with the least friction from reality often have the least friction in their sentences. Used often enough, it can make a brilliant person sound less confident than they are. We had people with deep, first-hand knowledge trying to think at the edge of what anyone knows. Skip to content Menu Home | Locally brewed alcohol claims lives of at least 40 people in Nigeria [FILE IMAGE]: Plastic containers with illegally produced alcohol. Image Credits : SAPS Facebook SABC News 18 September 2026, 15:39 [SAST] At least 40 people have died in Nigeria following the consumption of locally brewed alcohol containing methanol.
Former shoplifter ran 'steal-to-order' Whatsapp groupFormer shoplifter ran 'steal-to-order' Whatsapp groupCloseKeeley Knowles stole up to £7,000 worth of designer goods every day and became known as "Birmingham's most prolific shoplifter". It does not need its researchers trained to sound like politicians.
The wider picture
For an hour and a half, some of the smartest people working in AI tried to reason, in public, about genuinely difficult questions. But a noticeable share of the reaction was about how often the speakers said “like”. Meanwhile, much of the public conversation about AI is being led by politicians, executives, and professional commentators who have mastered the opposite skill: delivering simple, polished certainty about things they barely understand. The honest answer to an important technical question is often: it depends on the objective, the data, the environment, the time horizon and what exactly you mean by “intelligence”.
But AI makes it unusually dangerous because the gap between what the technology can do, what people think it can do, and what institutions claim it can do is already enormous. If the people who understand the systems retreat into papers, private labs, and conversations legible only to one another, the vacuum will not remain empty. It will be filled by people whose expertise is language itself: message discipline, emotional hooks, selective statistics, and sentences engineered to survive a news cycle.
Someone begins a sentence before they know exactly where it will end.
What has been reported
It is to help technical people carry more of their intelligence across the gap. Ask it:Which words in this explanation require prior knowledge? When I need to think, my instinct is to keep the audio channel occupied: “like”, “um”, “sort of”, “you know”. Barack Obama often did something more effective. Give people one story to carryPeople rarely repeat your framework accurately. The simplest story structure I know is:A person wanted something. Put the claim before the caveatExperts often lead with everything that could make them wrong.
There are two cases where that may not hold. ”The uncertainty is still there.
What happens next
If you bury your conclusion under seven qualifications, someone with less knowledge will state a worse conclusion in eight words and own the conversation. The goal is not to make every AI researcher sound like a media-trained CEO. But technical people cannot complain that public debate is shallow while refusing to learn how ideas travel. Give people one story they can carry into the next room. The future of AI will not be decided only by the people building the systems.
It will also be decided by the people who can explain what those systems are, what they are not, and what we should do about them. Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to key eventsConversationsAI (artificial intelligence)Your AI doomsday questions answered: ‘Why aren’t these companies being held to account? ’After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters answered your questions on the reality of the AI threat Updated 1d agoAisha Down, Blake Montgomery and Dan Milmo Fri 18 Sep 2026 12.
The report has been compiled by Press Orb using information reported across vrash.substack.com, theguardian.com, wired.com, sabcnews.com. Details are presented according to the information available at the time of publication and may change as authorities, organisers or other relevant parties provide updates.