Fake: It's only a matter of time until disinformation leads to calamity

Too late. It's been this way all through human history.

My favourite one has to be when six friends boarded the H.M.S. Dreadnought, and savagely murdered the British Imperial system with a sophmoric prank (1).

1. https://sniggle.net/cole.php

Those who worry about "disinformation" seem to only know one way to deal with it, and that is with more control to the responsible people (them) and less to everyone else.

This has already led to plenty of calamity, and will lead to more.

I remember a theory I first heard about in Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel", not invented by him and he was clear about it being speculative: The question was why so few animals in Africa can get domesticated. The theory was that since animals there co-evolved with humans, they evolved to be unpredictable (so our big brains wouldn't help us in figuring them out) and capricious (so that we'd regret it if we tried).

Whether that theory is true or not, I'm convinced that the same thing applies to our current political reality: We are met with a flood of attempts to shape us and manipulate us. Insane amounts of money are being spent on it, and our generation's smartest aren't merely working to get us to click on ads. They're working on the other alignment problem - not aligning AI with human preferences, but aligning the population with its leaders preferences.

Society is reacting like zebras, with unpredictable and destructive choices, like electing reality TV stars.

The course Tim Harford obliquely sides with here, is to keep the means of faking things in the hands of a few (since he says that the AI experts who think people will get used to it aren't taking it seriously enough). This will make everything worse.

When did we begin to believe the “news” in the first place?

Anyone who's read even a moderate amount of literature from history, old news filings, old political pamphlets and just about any amount of private and state propaganda from any era of history, or anyone who's read accounts of the things so many (possibly most) average people and many educated people believed throughout much of history would know how laughable it is to think that misinformation and disinformation (today's boogeymen) are anything new. Sure, AI lets them be grown to new scale, but even this has a saturation point. Proportionally i'd argue that in any case, the problem was no less, and probably worse in some ways even as near back as the recent past. Why? Because open access to honest and diverse information was much more restricted. It isn't so much today, though you need to sift, as anyone has always had to anyhow.

The modern notion in some circles that we should entrust "filtering" and even regulatory controls against this to governments and their helpers in the major tech companies is downright grotesque given the sources of so much of the most lethal misinformation and the outcomes of similar social control throughout history.

If you can rig the media you don't need to directly rig the election.