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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

From hypernormalisation to hyperreality.

I’ve been telling my friends that 5-10 years from now, the only things that you’ll be able to ~100% trust is what happens in front of your eyes, in that very moment. You can elect to trust reliable news organizations to vet things for you, but even if you do, due to polarization a huge subset of the world will think you’ve been got and discard everything as fake.

Look at stuff like Sora, or all the new voice models coming out. Just a few days ago there was a high school athletic coach (!) arrested for cloning the principal’s voice using that to say vile stuff. He only got caught because he used his own e-mail.

Now combine that with the fact that Microsoft’s new Phi-mini model approaches GPT-3.5 performance using 3.8 billion parameters, whilst GPT-3.5 uses 175 billion. And we’re only ~5 years of optimization into this tech.

I want to get off Mr Bones’ wild ride.

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> the only things that you’ll be able to ~100% trust is what happens in front of your eyes

Won't this just be a return to the historical norm?

Prior to photography being invented, there was no guarantee that any retelling of events (whether spoken, written or drawn) was true.

It will be weird for people alive today, but it doesn't seem that risky from a societal perspective.

> doesn't seem that risky from a societal perspective.

I would wager we will see an improvement to society.

Good point. When I was first exploring the Bible, I'd get bored with the detailed lists of people who saw things happen. Took me years to realize that the lists were people who were still alive at the time and could provide verification.

verification… for events happening in the Bible?

Seriously?

We already know you cannot trust what you see with your eyes (check any "compare eye-witness reports with trusted video recordings" or watch Penn & Teller).

We're in for a fun and wild ride.

> you’ll be able to ~100% trust is what happens in front of your eyes

5-10 years from now we may have vision pro gen 5, or whatever system achieves market dominance, between our eyes and what happens in front of us.

Even without that, we have at least one crowd funded YouTuber growing mammalian cells in vats with the explicit intention of making a "meat robot".

https://youtu.be/Z_ZGq8Tah0k?si=GuV1QC50jiv7yHP7

There's not a huge gap between that and a Westworld style infiltration-by-printed-robot.

The gap is as huge as between ancient Greeks discovering planets and us having colony on Mars.

You think that the gap between "a meat robot" and "a meat robot of a specific shape" is that big?

(If you're thinking of the robots' brains in the TV show, sure, that's a totally different challenge; but you don't need them for a replacement-takeover scenario, there's a lot of other ways to do that).

I won't.

AR has better real world capabilities and use cases than VR. AR is what you use to enhance reality or make it easier. VR is where you go when you want fiction.

Aside from entertainment, I don't understand this VR push when AR is arguably better for many of the non-entertainment uses

Wouldn't AR be as susceptible to a sort "real world" injection attacks as well? Vision Pro uses cameras to record the outside world and display it back to the user, it should be relatively easy to add/remove objects in the rendered feed.

Vision Pro is VR. It's just using the surrounding environment to build the virtual one. Something like HoloLens is true AR.

And here I thought it wasn't any of those but "spatial computing". Apple told us so it must be true.

That is a plot point of Ghost in the Shell's Laughing Man.

People where unable to see the face of the hacker. Instead they saw a smiley.

Ghost in the shell anticipated so much. The premise of the first movie is that a model gains sentience (creates its ghost out of thin air), claims asylum, and the model merges itself with the ghost within the major.

Everything in that series depicted is stuff that either exists today or will exist within 30 years. Everything.

You can trust what happens in front of your eyes until everyone starts wearing augmented reality contact lenses.

> I want to get off Mr Bones’ wild ride.

the ride never ends

"I’ve been telling my friends that 5-10 years from now, the only things that you’ll be able to ~100% trust is what happens in front of your eyes, in that very moment. You can elect to trust reliable news organizations to vet things for you,"

The time is now. Even the mainstream news organizations are probably high 90s% reliable as they've been caught selectively editing, not vetting sources or facts, and displaying biases.

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