Of course, no one now can know for sure what the consequences will be.... but I'm intrigued by the possibility that this might be a good thing. Could this help make people more savvy about evidence, and less focused on the concrete and superficial? Like I said, I -- we -- don't know.

Perhaps the effect of spam and phishing on the general population provides some insight into this. Have they increased the degree of healthy scepticism and delayed judgement in the population overall? I don't think there's any knee-jerk obvious answer to that, but perhaps there has been some research into that.