Blurred lines. Will AI hide the truth of the world from us?
As you read this you accept a human wrote it. And yes it was, by me. Because I said it was. And not that an AI would lie about writing it. But how will we know?
AI-generated content is indistinguishable from reality. We’re at an important technology inflexion point where our technology is now replicating us.
In a near future, websites begin adopting a new checkmark system. A green tick of approval; “Written by a human for humans”, or “AI free!” The lines have blurred between human expression and semantic interpretation.
When it comes to news, local and global headlines change the way we think and adapt to change. Or not adapt.
News shapes who we are, what we believe in and how we react.
Oxford University's Medium post outlines where people get their news. As you would expect in the UK it's increasingly online, and in fact for everyone below the age of 34, it's both websites and apps. In the US one in three people get their news from Facebook.
85% of the world owns a smartphone. Our focus has become the piece of glass we carry like a natural appendage. We cherish it like wearing a cross. The most visible token connects us with the early 21st century. It feeds us our daily reality. Our understanding of what's happening in our world is curated and pushed to us. What needs to be done, and when? What to believe, what to buy and what you should support both politically and culturally. Billions of us consume our understanding of the world through our phones.
Consider now a sentient AI. And it begins a targeted infiltration of Facebook. Not as an old-school virus hack that the cybersecurity team at Meta is prepared for, but acting as something more credulous. A legitimate actor. Commencing an untraceable campaign of generating and rendering a narrative, posting and sharing, connecting with and eventually reaching a billion people. As it grows it changes what it feeds us in order to subvert our subconscious. It placates us with fake news. Engineered storytelling. Mass psychology triggered with prime directives. Artificial superstition that breeds hate. The worst of us, orchestrated by AI. Give us today our daily artificial reality.
The immediate concern is that AI is coming for our jobs. That it will displace tens of millions of us. Rendering what we've learnt and made a living from to being obsolete. Taking away our livelihoods. But the real concern is the distortion of our reality.
How will we distinguish the truth from AI?
The law of accelerating returns explains that more effective methods come from one stage of evolutionary advancement that are then employed to construct the following level. An example is natural selection in the process of biological evolution. Hence, as time passes, the rate of evolution grows exponentially.
The history of technology isn't linear, but exponential. Moore's law is expected to end around 2025 as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century and exponential growth experiences exponential growth. The compounding effect moves beyond chip density and cost and accelerates away to large-scale quantum computing running at zero cost.
In the 21st century we won't see 100 years of progress but at the current rate, we'll see 20,000 years of progress … 20,000 years of progress in the remaining 77 years of this century. It’s impossible to fathom the exponential compounding of technology in the coming decades.
The transition this century will change humanity.