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Comment by code51 | Hacker News Reader

End of the internet as we know it. Everything will be fake. Maybe-human-zones will be created (again... by startups) but nobody will be sure whether there is actually a human on the other end.

Face-to-face experiences and carefully planned group activities will start to earn a "premium" status. People will be divided: the ones who prefer the virtual and the ones who prefer the physical. The ones losing the physical contact in the process will experience more and more mental health problems over the years.

The biggest impact will be on the election process and democracy as we know it.

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I also fear about the destiny of the open Internet. The AI garbage and fake-everything will flood the zone, as it is already doing. This flooding may also have some positive consequences such as the death of social media.

Though, writing from Europe, I believe governments will take a more active role in creating these "human-zones" with real identity verification. For instance, in the EU we already have the eID project in the making:

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/D...

Moreover, I am still highly skeptical about the labor market impacts upon white-collar jobs. The alleged productivity increases will mostly mean automating boring menial tasks in these jobs.

Impacts upon democracy and politics are also my biggest concerns at the moment.

Why do you feel like this is scarier than the internet 30 years ago? Your comment could be written in 1993, describing how everything will change because of the internet. I'm not saying AI won't impact democracy (obviously the internet has) but I'm having a hard time relating to people who seem so ready to declare the end of civilization as we know it. Humans are resilient, and we've made it through the industrial and tech revolutions to create entities more powerful than ourselves, so what is different now?

Not to mention legal ramifications - evidence such as audio, video will be brought into question

> but nobody will be sure whether there is actually a human on the other end

If that is true, why would it matter?

Living with doubt is not easy on our minds, that's why. Today we know there's a portion of fake content there already but we're not living with the doubt that %100 is fake.

I'm off to see if there are any studies on this.

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