How Tech is Recycling Big Tobacco’s Playbook

The Center for Humane Technology is a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that the most consequential technologies serve humanity. We bring clarity to how the tech ecosystem works in order to shift the incentives that drive it.

Weaponizing Uncertainty: How Tech is Recycling Big Tobacco’s Playbook

Naomi Oreskes on the playbook of manufactured doubt
March 20, 2025

[Excerpt]

One of the hardest parts about being human today is navigating uncertainty. When we see experts battling in public and emotions running high, it's easy to doubt what we once felt certain about. This uncertainty isn't always accidental—it's often strategically manufactured.

Historian Naomi Oreskes, author of "Merchants of Doubt," reveals how industries from tobacco to fossil fuels have deployed a calculated playbook to create uncertainty about their products' harms. These campaigns have delayed regulation and protected profits by exploiting how we process information.

In this episode, Oreskes breaks down that playbook page-by-page while offering practical ways to build resistance against them. As AI rapidly transforms our world, learning to distinguish between genuine scientific uncertainty and manufactured doubt has never been more critical.

[ Center for Humane Technology ] - Weaponizing Uncertainty_ How Tech is Recycling Big Tobacco’s Playbook.mp3

[Source] Weaponizing Uncertainty: How Tech is Recycling Big Tobacco’s Playbook

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