We, as humans, are well beyond being mentally ready for the internet and social media alone. Most of the key communication of the 20th Century was based on a tradition of duty and service in reporting and, generally, leadership. The Natzis of the 40s died not because the idea was 'wrong' (which it was) but because bad leadership and greed caused extinction. Before Poland, Europe was plenty happy letting Hitler be. Why was Hitler successful? Because he told people what they wanted to hear. You are better. We are better. We deserve more. It's their fault we are like this.
Self bias is the critical failure of the human mind. Tell someone that they deserve more and that they are better than others and they will believe you.
In a world where politicians and companies (same thing really) can use AI to collect your online persona and then fill your day with advertising designed just for you, telling you that you are right and it is 'them' who are wrong will work on nearly everyone. It already does. People watch news channels and follow influencers that make their feeds echo chambers, it drives extremism. How does a society tell you that you are wrong, that the other person is right?
Humanity and humankind made Hitler. Humanity and human kind will make tools that succeed at their goals to make others do what they want. We are already in freefall, this is a rocket booster on our back.
Plato wrote to counter the sophists and skeptics of his day. The gospels have Pilate asking Jesus a philosophical question, "What is truth?" This is hardly new, just the technology is better.
You can’t measure the difference in progress from a modern vantage point.
Once upon a time large numbers of people thought we were actively being invaded by aliens because of a radio broadcast that wasn’t even deliberate manipulation. Nevertheless, we made it through.
Everything is relative.
Once upon a time large numbers of people thought we were actively being invaded by aliens because of a radio broadcast that wasn’t even deliberate manipulation. Nevertheless, we made it through.
This probably isn’t true. This story has persisted for decades based off of newspaper articles from decades ago. It illustrates the power of false information dissemination on readers provided that information is packaged in the right way.
I much prefer living with today's polarization and people disagreeing on minor things like those you mentioned, than in the age of one-way broadcasts where there is no arguing and no other perspective at all.
You can not compare that to online conversations that you find inconvenient. And if you didn't believe in bidirectional communication you wouldn't participate here, so I think you do believe in it.
That doesn’t mean I can’t “talk to myself” in a way or think about stuff. I just have no auditory sensation whatsoever. It’s just abstract/immaterial reasoning. I’d wager if I did an FMRI the audio part would not light up but the speech part would.
If I say “pink elephant,” you don’t one? Or better yet, if i say “Dumbo,” you don’t see the ears?
You don’t hear songs in your head?
If I write “I’ll be back” you don’t hear it now in a thick German accent?
Inconceivable! (As they say)
It might also be that there are differences in the amount of attention given to different kinds of imagination.
But the way the brain is structured, everything is firing all the time… or at least, that’s why it is so hard for me to conceive
Now you have made me curious. Where would the thick German accent be, when pronouncing those words? I can imagine other sentences (anything with "th", for example) where you would hear a German accent. But with "I'll be back"?
Maybe "in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice" would've been more accurate, since I can't detect anything particularly German in the way it's said either.
- I do get visual dreams. That's the only time I have a visual imagination; that, or if I'm on the verge of sleeping.
- If you say "pink elephant", I've got the concepts of elephant, pink and so on in my head. I can 'see' the geometry in a way, but it's totally abstract. Think of it like a pink elephant in a game where the renderer is off, and you won't go far wrong; all the information is there, and I can use it, I just don't see anything. Not as a hallucination, and not 'off to the side' either.
- I absolutely do hear songs in my head. Aphantasia usually only refers to visual imagination.
- If I want to hear it in a German accent, I do. By default, while I read something there's no auditory element at all. If I'm reading a book, I'll usually narrate the spoken sentences to myself and not do so for the other text; it's a matter of choice. Narrating it slows down my reading a lot, to the speed of fast speech.
I wouldn't characterize how I read -- which as far as I know is normal, but who can tell! -- as narrating to myself. Rather, it involves the sensation of somehow pronouncing words without necessarily hearing them. I can do this much faster than I could narrate the text explicitly.
I can also read without either narrating or pronouncing, but I find that it cuts down comprehension noticeably.
I'm also terrible with faces. I can see someone I've known for years with a different haircut and I'll completely fail to recognize them. If everyone suddenly went bald I'd be helpless to recognize anybody.
Edit: Like, I'm right now trying to conjure up the face of my girlfriend of 23 years (who is on a business trip right now). I just can't do it. It's kind of trippy.
When I try to shortcut the monologue on the grounds I already know what I'm thinking about, it feels wrong.
This hasn't been much of a problem recently, possibly because my inner monologue has sped up to match that I watch and listen to YouTube and podcasts and audiobooks in ~ double speed.
What do you do when it comes time to get your point across to others? That's my Achilles heel. If people aren't prepared to really dig in and go through the motions/look things up and vonnect or pick up ideas that I have (that are the sum of many years diving esoteric topics), I might as well just throw my hands up and just do whatever myself. As it's generally a shorter time to materialization than trying to explain it.
One of the funniest things was when I was working at a bike shop. The owner was a really cool guy and would visit the store from time to time. I was stocking some bike rack stuff on one side of a dual display, talking about an app I was essentially brainstorming over out loud while I was doing this mindless task.
I walked around the display and owner was standing there. He looked at me with a smile and says, "That was quite the discussion you were having with yourself. Sounds like a great idea for an app."
We both started laughing and I had to explain him why I did this.
Talking to pets also works. They've never been able to offer a very useful response, alas.
What happens when you consider a spatial problem like an IQ test? Do you have to talk your way through it? If you see an art piece, do you only appreciate it through the monologue, or does it feel beautiful in a non-verbal way too?
> If you see an art piece, do you only appreciate it through the monologue, or does it feel beautiful in a non-verbal way too?
I appreciate it both ways, yeah. But the visual in that case would mostly be just "this is pretty" or "that's disturbing" etc. Any kind of genuine art critique (such as I am even capable of doing) would be talked through mentally.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-...
Your comment seems like a non sequitur.
So in the same sense that I can use math without it being central to my thinking, it doesn't seem hard to believe that others can use language without it being central to their thinking.
Personally I've tried to become less dependent on language for thought, because I noticed I kept getting stuck on how to verbalize some thoughts even when there was no real need to. I think it's had an effect but it's hard to tell if I'm just imagining it or if imagining it is precisely the point (and I still get stuck on how to explain stuff in some imaginary context, but I suppose that's progress?)
My best guess is that an internal monologue may simply be an intermediate step as we internalize speech into our thoughts, so the need to keep verbalizing thought could eventually reduce, but it's hard to notice these kinds of changes in yourself because the skills don't disappear they just become something else.
I call it mental-ese. To talk i often first have to translate between it and my native language (English). obviously, it's by its very nature hard to express in words exactly what mental-ese consists of, and it might arguably be impossible in the same way we cannot express general qualia using the written language.
but I've heard enough similarities from others trying to express such to be convinced there's something there. surely the phrase "I can't express my thoughts in words" is common and has meaning to you?
The analogies I've heard commonly from myself and others to describe it is that I see/feel the shape of relationship between the concepts or abstract thoughts before I then try to put it into language. just as my other senses do not require written language to first describe (my experience of tasting a strawberry is something qualitatively different experienced/impressed on the mind, not a word).
Another analogy I've used to try to convey my apparent experience to others in contrast to many people is that it appears to me that a common way of experiencing the world is to have relative primacy or weight on "things"(words) and then people have to work towards the relationships between things. whereas I feel my mind works the other way, receiving impressions of relationships between or behind things first, such that they are the primary unit, and the words/things must then be built up from these.
FWIW I often throw this random factoid out there when someone presents an overly broad "humans in general" argument/observation. The reaction is usually polarized :P
But who is parsing all the reciprocal new false and fallacios "truths" in this wonderful human way to sanitise the inputs to the next model that's evaluated? If humans could scale so easily there wouldn't be this problem in the first place.
We switched to this always connected world only 10-15 years ago and I think we are far from having seen all the consequences.
Algorithmic bubbles, mass surveillance, addictive algorithms and applications are fairly recent and we can already see really disgusting consequences.
Our civilization is resilient so it takes time to erode but since a few years, I have hard time imagining a positive technological future. All I see is technology made to exploit human breaches for money.
Humans don’t look like they are adapting to Tik Tok properly so I’m not confident they’ll understand this new AI powered world.
(I have no doubt that powerful and dominant humans will adapt)
We were gonna cure cancer and explore space. It’s shameful.
We could be in space.
Unfortunately we are offsetting those medical gains with higher incidence of some types of cancer. This is due to exposure to carcinogens (toxic chemicals) and unhealthy lifestyles (mainly obesity).
We haven’t adapted successfully, we aren’t adapting successfully and we won’t adapt successfully.
We were way better off before smartphones. Looking back on it now, we may have been even better off before the Internet.
By any conceivable perspective you would care to measure we’re failing abysmally as a collective at identifying fact from fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_Academy
"According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by playing into or presenting the argument that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias or political correctness. Commenators such as Beauchamp and Chris Quintana, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, have disputed Heterodox Academy's contention that college campuses are facing a "free-speech crisis," noting the lack of data to support it and arguing that advocacy groups such as Heterodox Academy functionally do more to narrow the scope of academic debates than any of the biases they allege."
Seems like someone whose success is supported, and views are amplified because they conveniently align to people with money.
Not to contradict myself, but I have to disagree.
Smartphones and the internet have improved the quality of life for a significant fraction of humanity. Given the choice between going back to a pre-internet technological paradigm of landline phones and total corporate control over media and communication, or somehow learning to deal with opening Pandora's box, I'll take the latter.
The detrimental effects of the media forms you’ve listed are better considered in ways other than through events that themselves are (ironically) pop culture tropes today (moral panic over music, the “war of the worlds” panic myth).
It’s hard to even compare technology as pervasive as AI, smartphones and social media to TV and music (which are pervasive in their own right by definition, but not so much by comparison). The former is capable of subsuming and manipulating the forms of the latter and its effects are far more direct than the latter’s in respect to the present age.
See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36426276
Population is shrinking in the "post-connected" world
You might think like their narrative is "think critically, and consider everything critically".
But the actual message is, your fellow humans are stupid, they fall for misinformation and fake sources. Ignore all alternative sources of information and most importantly, do not trust your friends and people you know, instead assume they are stupid and when they contradict the authority, be sure to put up a firewall and stop the propagation of dangerous thoughts.
Truth is always more powerful than lies. Don't underestimate your own reasoning capabilities, and if you do underestimate them, the most important thing to do is to train them. I'm not saying to argue against an anonymous bot, but if you meet in person, if your friends have non standard ideas, don't assume they are stupid and fell for misinformation. Not everyone on the other side is stupid, or heartless, or bad.
They are trying to inject faults into various alternative information sources just to turn around and catch them and say "see? This podcaster is a conspiracy theorist and unreliable!".
It's mainstream media which benefits the most from efficient fault and spam injection into alternative information sources, because it makes them relatively more trustworthy. And it is actually against the interests of alternative news sources to be caught in a lie because it is likely to erode their reputation.
If you're confused by the whole disinformation phenomenon, ask the simple question, who benefits.
And remember that the media's willingness to intentionally lie and deceive their readers is directly proportional to the cost to your reputation, and the likeliness of your readers to discover the truth.
That video is clearly disinformation / misinformation. There is zero chance that video would be played on a conventional broadcaster. Why? They have to be accountable for the content they put in front of viewers. Conventional broadcasters have to participate in advertising standards councils and answer to regulators.
On the other hand, platforms are unaccountable and unwilling to act in the public interest. Profit trumps all. The average person has no idea how to record an ad that was just shown to them by a "platform". That video that was in the corner of the webpage that turns out to be scammy? Ooops, you scrolled too far or used the back button and it's now gone.
There's a large swath of problems online that are clearly misinformation and / or disinformation. Nothing is going to improve on this front so long as "platforms" are wholly unaccountable to the general public. And we're running blindly forward into making this far, far worse before anything will change now that generative AI lowers the bar to produce bullshit that looks convincing on the first pass.
Big tech disappoints me to no end.
By the way, how's that scammer SBF doing? I heard he managed to scam even more money than that funny YouTube ad, and I think he was advertising on mainstream media too. Even got to lobby in Congress.
This is still far from the leading mainstream narrative that "your fellow humans are stupid". By your anecdote I can learn that here we have another person who's capable of recognizing false information, therefore it isn't dangerous.
Anyone who fell for disinformation is welcome to step in and contribute an anecdote to the opposite statistics so maybe I'll be convinced people really are guillible and need protecting.
Somehow it's always other people who the speaker thinks are more stupid and will fall for something he sees as a scam.
Put a button in the corner of the ad that says "report this", and get a human to check if the ad passes a smell test. If a platform can cancel accounts of random people for violating policies at random, they can put a small amount of effort into enforcing policies on advertisers.
You're deflecting from the disinformation narrative into elderly scam. Which I agree is a problem, just a completely different one than the disinformation narrative presents.
Advertisements are often total bullshit (and I would likely consider anything created by AI to almost certainly be), but that is an entirely different phenomenon than today's concept of "disinformation."
One definition for disinformation is "deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda". The ad I viewed meets that qualification. This was not your typical advertisement trying to persuade the viewer that their product is better than others. It used a generated video of Elon Musk saying things that he did not say, endorsing a product he did not endorse in an attempt to appear legitimate. This is very different from traditional advertising.
The AI shitpocalypse is here. We get to watch it play out in real time over the coming decade.
GM doesn't claim that Ford is spreading "disinformation" -- but newspapers, TV stations, politicians, etc do constantly claim that people with the opposite viewpoint on a variety of topics are spreading disinformation. And now, despite the 1st Amendment, even courts are enabling censorship because the censored words are "hateful" or "disinformation" or "violence."
Free speech comes with the obligation of responsibility. You can't go around yelling "Fire!" in a theatre because of the clearly obvious possible negative consequences of that action. Legacy mainstream media appear to understand that better than big tech platforms do. Big tech wants to profit off the illegal and unethical content without having any responsibility for doing so. This is wrong.
The bare minimum standard of ethical behaviour is to not do things that harm other people. The ads I am referring to meet the test of causing harm to people that act based on the content presented. Plus they violate securities laws. It's pretty cut and dry for that case.
Due to which Tom Cruise talking in an ad had bigger impact.
Broadcasters don't act in the public interest either, they act in owner's interest.
The mob mentality is real and it makes its participants vulnerable to making bad decisions and going with the flow. We see this with the cult like devotion of Trump supporters. We see examples in consumerism. There was a time when people fought each other over a Cabbage Parch Doll. Our moments of lucid analysis of an issue or speech occur far less often than our moments of “going with the flow”.
Whether I agree with their final conclusion is irrelevant, I can't with straight face call a person who spent his time carefully considering his decisions less intelligent than a person who didn't spend a single moment to think about it. Even if they reached the wrong conclusion.
It's actually hilarious that you call them mob mentality. Going with the herd automatically is the most mob mentality possible.
Have you tried talking to Trump supporters before you assumed they are "cult" and "mob"?
You're exactly the kind of person I directed my post at. You've been successfully fooled into thinking other people are stupid without even trying to understand them.
And for the record, I think flat earthers are more intelligent than people who never even asked themselves how do we know that the earth is spherical. They are not intelligent because they couldn't understand the answer, but they are more intelligent than a person who never even asked the question.
The people I consider more intelligent than flat earthers tried asking this question, looked for the solution and could understand basic geometry enough to understand why it is true. Anyone else isn't more intelligent, just more conformal and knowledgeable. In the case of knowing the earth is flat, it's such well known fact it's just pure conformity never asking why, and I don't value that at all. It's not an intelligent trait.
Ah. The, “they did their research” and “read lots of words” retort. It’s ok that almost all of it is wrong. What matters is that they read a lot. They thought a lot about it! The thoughts were completely wrong but quantity over quality, right?
Consider this. What does it say about you that you think people with no knowledge of or training in virology can legitimately said to have conducted research into the efficacy of vaccines?
I have not successfully been fooled into thinking that people are dumb. All of us are dumb in certain areas. All of us can be manipulated. All of us are susceptible to false information. (Read up on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect as an example of this.)
It is absolutely an intelligent trait to rely on the expert knowledge of others. Hence, flat earthers are incredibly dumb. The knowledge that the Earth is spheroidal has been known for many hundreds of years. Another example. Almost everyone knows that 1+1=2 despite the fact that very few people can actually prove it. It is not intelligence to question this fact. It is intelligence to ask how to prove it and even more intelligence to understand the proof.
An intelligent person doesn’t question the efficacy of vaccines. The evidence of their efficacy is plain to see by the fact that polio is virtually nonexistent. An intelligent person asks why are vaccines effective. How do they work? Etc.
Any fool can ask questions. Asking the right questions requires some perspicacity.
The very first step to being an intelligent person is not being afraid to ask questions.
The second step is trying to understand it even if you might reach the wrong result.
Only if you passed those first two steps you even have the hope of answering the question correctly.
And even a child can prove that 1+1=2, and if you're such an NPC you think it's hard to prove, I honestly find flat earthers more intelligent.
Ironically, you're acting like such a bot that you're actually quite good at contradicting my point. You're begging the question (like "why are vaccines effective"). You don't look for understanding but for knowledge to remember then repeat.
I always value more the person who tried and failed than the person who never tried. I don't think a layperson can conduct academic research, but I think they can try to understand.
And I think that those who tried to understand yet reached the wrong conclusion are still much better than those who never tried.
There are no right questions, only right answers.
A point that does not pertain to what I said. I said nothing about “right” questions. There are dumb questions though. There are insightful questions. There are probing questions. There are nonsensical questions too. Like this question, “If vaccines are good for us then why do we have a bicameral legislative branch?”
A person not trained in virology or microbiology is absolutely unqualified to discern the difference between good information and bad information on the topic of vaccines. Such a person can’t possibly do anything that can be reasonably ascribed to “having done the research”. A person who has “done the research” and concludes that vaccines are bad is a fool no matter how many thousands of words or thoughts they devoted to the topic.
As a child this would have cracked me up (made me laugh very hard). Today it makes me cringe b/c I've heard similar arguments used to cripple the teaching of mathematics in schools.
synetic says "A person not trained in virology or microbiology is absolutely unqualified to discern the difference between good information and bad information on the topic of vaccines."
What about statistics: don't you need a Ph.D. in statistics to understand what is a good statistical measure and what is not and how to design trials?
What about logic and science? don't you need a Ph.D. in philosophy and either an M.D. or a Ph.D. in chemistry or biology to understand the logic of the complex systems that you must analyze to develop vaccines?
There's a lot missing here. Another is how people think: very few people distrust all vaccines but an incredibly large group of people distrust certain vaccines. And I believe you've mistaken certification for understanding. Too many things wrong and/or broken; impossible to fix; waste of time.
Sad.
How many children are capable of this level of abstract thinking?
People without training in statistics don’t understand how to properly design trials. I’m a mathematician and I don’t understand this since it is not something I’ve studied. I need to rely on the expert knowledge of others to tell what is and is not a good study design.
The large group of people that distrust certain vaccines rather than all of them are ignoramuses.
Presumably the "first order Peano Axioms" were noted sometime after Giuseppe Peano's birth in 1858. By your logic no one born before 1858 would be "capable of understanding how to prove 1+1=2", which is nonsense.
You seriously underrate everyone except yourself.
It seems hard to argue with that...but what exactly is the meaning of saying people are "absolutely unqualified" to do something which they in fact do constantly and which there is no obvious alternative in order for society to function?
If we accept that non-experts are not qualified to determine what is good information, then doesn't it entirely undermine democratic control over society?
For that matter, doesn't it entirely undermine the concept of management in industry or government? Individual autonomy and rights too?
Again, I'm not saying you are wrong, or that I have a counterargument, just that the logical implications seem extremely radical, and I don't know of a plan for how society can function on such a basis.
In my opinion the answer is this. Roughly speaking, in general: Overwhelming expert consensus opinion on a topic has a much higher chance of being correct than any contrary belief I have based off of “research” that I do. The overwhelming expert consensus might very well be wrong but it’s clear that they are way more likely to be right than I am.
Also, you have heard of "100 Autoren Gegen Einstein"? Obviously people who bring that up in an actual conflict of ideas are almost certainly not Einstein, but how do we know, and if we think we know who is right and it is the majority, how do we refute the claim that polls don't determine truth?
You inability to understand what is irrelevant complication, and your deferral to authority and expertise even when you are perfectly capable of understanding, is your own problem.
Here are two quote you said:
> "(There are no right questions, only right answers.)
A point that does not pertain to what I said. I said nothing about “right” questions."
> "Asking the right questions requires some perspicacity."
You also say "The thoughts were completely wrong". There are also no wrong thoughts, only wrong conclusions. A person afraid to "think" wrongly as the narrative so strongly tries to program people, is infinitely dumber than a person who doesn't constrain his thinking. That's what they want to happen. Amazing there are NPCs like you who avoid "wrongthink".
There are people who know a lot and understand nothing. Knowledge is spewing up complications from set theory. Understanding is being able to tell, by the context, that this is completely irrelevant.
You appealed to authority to even tell me that the earth is flat. You didn't say that we can observe the curvature from measuring distances, from doing an experiment with ships masts disappearing into the horizon, or any other way even ancient people figured it out. It's true because "The knowledge that the Earth is spheroidal has been known for many hundreds of years. ".
People "knew" the sun rotates around earth for thousand of years. And the truth won despite it being against the "authority". And nothing will change that understanding, even if some string theory will discover the 11th dimension or whatever, because that will be irrelevant in the same sense that set theory is irrelevant to 1+1=2. For these same reasons you don't need and shouldn't appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority is only knowledge. Zero understanding.
I said nothing about "doing the research". A person who deferred to authority and knowledge to answer a question is always inferior to a person who tried to understand and failed. A person appealing to authority is just trying to mirror someone's intelligence. A parrot who repeats a correct sentence is still dumber than a human saying a wrong sentence.
A parrot who repeats "vaccines are good" because he heard that is always the greater fool than the anti vax who says vaccines are bad.
A parrot who says 1+1=2 because set theory shows less understanding than a kid with an abacus. The parrot is saying irrelevant things while the child isn't.
Everyone appeals to authority in the sense you use this phrase because no one has the time to to argue out everything from first principles. In a discussion about why flat earthers are wrong I’d make an argument that shows they are wrong. In a discussion about misinformation and how easily duped people are in general I wouldn’t make such an argument since it isn’t pertinent.
A person who thinks "flat earthers are stupid" because "everyone knows", and not because of the actual reasons this is true, is not smarter. The flat earther also knows everyone knows the earth is round. You didn't display any knowledge they don't have.
How can you tell the earth is round is a pretty insightful question. The difference between us is that I understand that people coming to recognize truth from falsehood, including making mistakes and falling in the way, is more important than reaching the correct result. Which is why I'm not afraid of disinformation, because I think people need to not be afraid to think and ask questions and take a path where they don't get the correct result right away.
Mine while, you wish for people to avoid thinking and defer to authority. It's extremely relevant, it's at the core of my argument, that's what this discussion is all about.
The system failed the flat earther not because it prevented the false information from reaching them. The system failed to properly educate them to recognize truth from falsehood, and instead taught them, like your attitude, to rely on authority. The only difference between you is that their trust in authority has stopped. And their reasoning is bad because they never used them.
Sad.
People, as a whole, are still against censorship in its raw form, silencing people, burning books, etc. However once a book or video or idea is labeled "disinformation" it becomes dangerous, which means (according to the people doing the labeling) that NOT removing/eliminating it would be irresponsible or harmful.
Thirty years ago, we were discussing science papers on Usenet. I recall writing a message expressing optimism about a future in which everyone uses the Internet to consume high quality information directly from relevant specialists, rather than low quality information from nonspecialists. For example, I imagined Americans basing their voting decisions on an understanding of public policy issues developed by reading the journals of the American Economic Association, the American Society of Health Economists, the American Society of Criminology, the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences, etc.
Instead, Donald Trump was elected president.
Then we adapted. People learned about Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses. People use Wikipedia as a useful tool for research but don't trust it blindly. I think the same will happen with LLMs.
A more painful and pertinent question might be: Can democracy adapt to a post-truth world, and the answer to that I fear is probably no. How can a democracy function if it’s citizenry can’t remain informed?
But as we saw on Jan 6, 2021 -- whether they are "ready" for it and able to manage their emotions accordingly seems very much open to question.
All these memes tell you what not to believe. None of them provide a decent heuristic to know what to believe and where truth may lie.
This is a recipe for a paranoid, conspiracy theory riddled society.
Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to information availability in the past they will adapt. This is what societal norms and cultural memes are for. “Don’t believe everything you hear” “Don’t believe what you see on TV” “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” These are all ways that the human species uses memes and cultural norms to teach ourselves how not to fall victim to false information.
Of course some people are going to fall victim. They do so today through common scams. It is the right goal to bring this down to zero. But to say that the human species isn’t capable belies all prior history and shows little faith in the resilience that made us who we are.
That’s the broad problem with this AI doom and gloom: it has so little knowledge of and respect for the humanities and humankind that it arrogantly assumes that our species has never faced challenges like this before. It throws up its hands instead of asking what lessons from history we should take and what actions we should be focused on.
If I'm being generous, I think that these pieces attempt to stir panic as a means for spurring action for change and investment in these problems. That’s a meaningful goal, but one that also might be more meaningfully achieved if it wasn’t expressing the problem with such gloom.