The Consensus Algorithm
Nobody wrote it. Nobody voted on it. Everyone's executing it anyway — and a 160-year-old buried novel saw it coming.
Scenario: Paris, 1960, at a massive university of 180,000 students. An annual awards ceremony is underway, and every prize is for science or technical achievement — the humanities have all but disappeared. Our hero, Michel Dufrénoy, wins a prize for Latin verse… but the entire crowd laughs at him. Literacy is universal in this future Paris, but nobody reads anything except technical manuals.
When Michel goes looking for a copy of Hugo, or Balzac, or Lamartine, and discovers they've been erased from society’s memory entirely, his family is humiliated. He drifts from job to job, loses the one person he loves, and ends up collapsed in a cemetery during a snowstorm, crying out "O Paris!"
It's a bleak ending. This future scenario has remarkable inventions, like giant calculating machines described as huge pianos operated by a keyboard, connected to something like a fax machine, which banks use to coordinate their most advanced operations. It was a world of total computation and communication infrastructure, where humans still had to do all the thinking, and simply chose not to.
The culture killed itself by deciding literature wasn't worth anyone's time once the machines could handle everything measurable. Anyone refusing to conform — to venture beyond the bounds of technology — was an outcast.
In this story, the future doesn’t punish the slow. It punishes the independent thinker.
This is from a novel written 160 years ago by futurist Jules Verne. It was such an alarming idea that his editor refused to publish it. It sat in a drawer for more than 130 years.
I’ve been thinking about what might be Verne’s most important story lately — not because I think we’re heading for Michel’s Paris exactly, but because Verne’s dystopia was never really about the future. It was about groupthink — the machinery by which an opinion becomes a fact simply by being repeated enough times, by enough confident people, in the same room.
There’s a lot of AI groupthink now. Someone says something offhand on a Lex Friedman or a16z podcast…it's a good line, so it gets clipped. The clip gets quoted without the three hours of context around it. By the third repost it's not a soundbite anymore, it's a consensus. That consensus becomes an assumption baked into every strategy deck in Silicon Valley, a talking point among executives, and eventually a catchphrase repeated on Capitol Hill. Somewhere in that chain, the part where anyone verified it with actual logic or actual data just sort of disappears.
This happens in private, too. There are closed-door, invitation only forums where tech leaders sit with senators, DoD officials, and others defining what AI risk and opportunity mean for American safety and competitiveness. I know, because I’ve been in many of those meetings. In the span of a year, I’ve heard that AGI is a decade away, five years away, and 12 months away, sometimes by the same person. I heard the 12 month timeline while I was at a dinner at the Aspen Ideas Festival a few weeks ago. When I pressed for more details, the exec sniffed, “that’s just general knowledge now.”
This is how a new norm in AI gets established — not through data, not through argument, just through repetition at scale. Call it the consensus algorithm: nobody wrote it, nobody voted on it, but everyone's executing it anyway.
Here’s what the consensus algorithm looks like right now: you are more likely today to be unemployed with a computer science degree (7%) than a philosophy degree (5.1%). Ten years ago this would have sounded absurd. Here’s what happened:
Mark Cuban said studying philosophy could soon be worth more than a degree in computer science.
Reed Hastings said young people should study philosophy.
Goldman Sachs’ CIO Marco Argenti said that he told his daughter to study philosophy along with engineering.
In the span of a decade, computer science went from the safest bet in higher education to a major with departmental cutbacks. Rather than poaching entire academic robotics departments, the hottest tech companies are now scooping up philosophers.
Of course, none of this is really about which major you pick. It’s about how fast an entire culture can flip its convictions without anyone stopping to ask why and about who’s setting the terms of the flip.
Right now in America, it isn’t musicians, or athletes, or novelists who hold that kind of sway. It’s tech executives. A small number of people, mostly saying the same small number of things to each other, and the rest of us treating it as evidence rather than opinion.
A society allowing itself to be governed by consensus algorithm worries me, and it should worry you, too. Not which side of the philosophy-vs-code debate wins, but the fact that so few people in a room are willing to say something no one else in the room has already said.
In Verne’s book, Michel wasn’t destroyed because he couldn’t keep up. He was destroyed because he was the last person in Paris still willing to ask what any of it was for.
Somebody in the room has to be the one still asking what any of it is for. It might as well be you.