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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

I really don't want to contemplate the implications for crime or politics when we cannot trust even the most convincing evidence of wrongdoing. Innocent people can be smeared, guilty people can plausibly claim it was faked, and the inevitable result will be a world where truth is so obscured that people just believe whatever aligns with their preconceived notions. Which happens already, but it will get much worse.

And in the meantime, a generation of people who didn't grow up in that world will fall victim to forgeries of a quality they cannot conceive of.

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So what is to be done about it? Do we just let it continue as is and slowly erode society, do we just continue with further technological advancement blindly no matter what the social or economic costs?

I get this sounds hyperbolic but I really don’t see how the internet can continue like this. Like personally, if I was an artist, writer or musician I’d be never releasing any works online ever again. Sure people can get around that but like, I’d be making it harder to steal my stuff.

This is probably the moment when the internet is no longer “cool” and just starts to get weird.

I’m already becoming much much much more suspicious of the internet and even starting to question online forming participation, I have no idea if the comments section is real people or generated content made to influence people. It’s really turning me off cyberspace.

I'm not sure what can happen except maybe a country balkanized internet with all actions online tied to a real id. When the internet is all bots maybe Facebook can keep it's relevancy by garunteeing real human presences behind accounts

People are becoming more concerned about where their electricity and food and heat and shelter are going to come from. It won’t really be AI that tells you to get into the pod because the AI said it’s the only way to survive.

I expect the end result, and I think this is happening quickly, will be a rough splitting of humanity into the "onlines" and "offlines."

The onlines will live in their feedback chamber of AI generated content to stoke their ego and convince them they're 100% right and wise and, you know, you can express how right and wise you are to others if you buy this product. The same thing we have now, just turned up to about 50 on the 0-10 dial.

The offlines will interact mostly with other humans in person, and dismiss the concerns of the online world, and... pretty much act like humans have throughout history, for good and for bad.

The problem is that the online world takes an awful lot of resources and energy we seem to be getting pretty short on (at least if you want it reliable enough to run a datacenter), so that world has some endpoint, eventually.

The "online" world now has fairly solid influence over voting, while any "offline" world is going to find it very hard to organize any kind of politics at all.

Maybe the offline world just ends up retreating to remote areas and going for a more self-sufficient setup ? IDK, who knows?

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