The New Conspiracy Age (www.technologyreview.com)

MIT Technology Review’s new series, The New Conspiracy Age, explores how a volatile mix of technology and politics has turbocharged once-fringe theories into mainstream cultural forces. The pieces trace familiar patterns—from QAnon and antivaccine campaigns to weather-control myths and the “Mandela effect”—and argue that the modern twist is digital amplification: social platforms, recommendation algorithms, and political signaling make old fantastical narratives spread faster and deeper than ever. Notably, the series calls AGI itself the most consequential conspiracy of our time, a myth that has reshaped funding, public discourse, and industry priorities by promising an imminent machine takeover in ways that mirror long-standing apocalyptic thinking. For AI/ML practitioners the implications are concrete. Models trained on web-scale data risk absorbing and reproducing conspiratorial narratives, and recommendation systems can inadvertently radicalize users. Yet the series also offers a technical bright spot: experiments show chatbots, when given structured evidence and arguments, can be effective debunkers—suggesting a role for targeted conversational interventions. The reporting underscores urgent needs for better dataset curation, transparency about model limitations, robust moderation strategies, and tools designed to surface reliable evidence, not just optimize engagement. Researchers and engineers must treat misinformation as an adversarial signal shaping system behavior and societal trust.