2026-05-27
This is the footnote to my post "AI is technology, not a product." In it I paraphrase a line from Carl Sagan. Here's the full quote, where it comes from, and why it stuck with me. The line I keep coming back to is his last one: that a word like this "is not an aid to truth."
But why would we use a word so ambiguous that means so many different things… it gives you freedom… to seem to agree with someone else with whom you do not agree. It covers over difference… It is not an aid to truth.
— Carl Sagan, 1994 lecture at Cornell (the "lost lecture"), on video at about 4:20.
Sagan said this while answering a question about whether he believes in God. Let me be clear up front: I mean no offense to anyone, of any faith or none. I'm not here to re-argue that question, and this isn't a post about religion. What grabbed me is something narrower, and I think universal — his point about language.
Sagan described himself as agnostic, and read generously his argument here isn't an attack on belief at all. It's about intellectual honesty: when a single word means too many things at once, agreement on the word can quietly hide deep disagreement on the substance. The word does social work — it lets a room feel aligned — without doing any work toward the truth.
Reasoning carefully about large questions without dogma has a long pedigree. A number of the American founders held deist or Enlightenment-influenced views — Thomas Jefferson famously assembled his own edition of the gospels, keeping the moral teachings and setting the miracles aside. Undogmatic inquiry isn't a fringe stance; it's an old and respectable one.
Swap "God" for "AI" and Sagan's point lands the same. "AI" (and perhaps the word "Strategy") has become a word so broad that a room can nod in unison — "we need an AI strategy" — while each person means something different: a chatbot, a vendor's dashboard, a research program, a decision made with a human in the loop, or one made without. The agreement is real. The alignment is not. It's social lubrication, not truth.
That's the whole argument of the post. AI is a technology, not a product. And the first job in any engagement is to find out what people actually mean — before the strategy doc bakes in five different assumptions and calls it consensus.