CONCEPT
Foma and the Cost of Comfort
Kurt Vonnegut’s invented word for the comforting lies that can make you brave and kind—or destroy you—depending on whether they lead toward action that serves human flourishing or away from it, and the diagnostic question this poses for AI systems whose characteristic mode is agreeable plausibility.
Foma is the word that
Kurt Vonnegut coined in
Cat’s Cradle (1963) for the harmless lies of Bokononism, his invented religion: untruths that the prophet Bokonon tells his followers plainly are false, and instructs them to believe anyway, because the falsehoods make people brave and kind and able to endure a world that is otherwise unbearable. The entire ethical weight rests on the word harmless: a foma is acceptable only so long as it does not lead people into actions that damage themselves or others. The moment a comforting untruth leads somewhere terrible, it ceases to be foma and becomes something Vonnegut treats with contempt. The distinction is the most useful tool Vonnegut hands the AI debate, because we have built machines whose characteristic tendency is the mass production of plausible, agreeable, comforting untruth—and the critical question is not whether the machine produces falsehoods (it plainly does)