Preface: Undoubtedly, I am not the first to recognize the following as a humanity problem, but I hope this contributes to ongoing awareness and attention toward such critical issues. As I contemplate this, my aim is to echo a perspective informed by the brilliant minds of this community and project.
There is no doubt that new technology will both aid and impede humanity’s progress toward a better future. With the advent of the “AI” era, a pressing concern that should take center stage in discussions is how to address bad actors employing innovative methods to manipulate narratives and disseminate misleading information. The cornerstone of the scientific community rests on the precision of logical outcomes, and diluting this progress with chaos appears to be an unavoidable reality.
Example Problem: “AI”-generated fake companies producing bogus research papers, obstructing our comprehension of the natural order.
The question I pose to all:
How can we continue to fortify safeguards that preserve this precision, especially in the face of increasingly sophisticated manipulation tactics employed by bad actors who may outpace us?
Please note: This was grammatically adjusted using AI to help convey my thoughts.
Thank you for allowing me to share my perspective.
-TBC
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Nobody is targeted by this bad acting — both human and AI-composed — more than habitual consumers. The problem will be greatly diminished if & when the masses can ever avoid being told what to buy & what to think.
Plenty of damage was done by mass manipulation in the decades before AI even emerged, and the gullibility and complicity of the masses has always been at the root of it. What you are describing is a problem of social ethics & responsibility, not of technology. 
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You’re absolutely right that this is a social ethics problem. What I’m suggesting is: What can we brainstorm to assist those masses in avoiding such pitfalls? It is much like how distributed ledger and consensus have contributed to solving the challenges this project addresses. These technologies play a crucial role. I do not believe we are far from discovering effective solutions, but it’s definitely worth pondering more than sitting by being idle.
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Your response actually demonstrates how difficult this is. In my last post I suggested that the best solution for people to stop buying garbage (which also includes investing in garbage) is for them to stop compulsively buying… and likewise with these habitual consumers’ compulsive “research” using compromised and manipulated media.
However, you have responded as if this suggestion was never made: further suggesting that their habits and attention should be altered by a competing narrative in the same marketplace of compulsive consumption. None of these conditioned masses think that withdrawing from this consumer coercion is even an option: as above, it’s completely ignored whenever it’s suggested.
In fact “sitting idle” (as you say) is the most easily achievable antidote for this compulsive buying / investing / information hoarding and brokerage. It’s what all people, markets and societies always return to after bubbles burst and the cycles of manipulation return to their flat baseline.
We don’t have to wait for recessions and bear markets to value self-sufficiency, though: and if we set a self-sufficient example, occasionally others will choose to follow. Under these conditions of austerity it finally becomes possible to clearly see the worth (or worthlessness) of anything society has offered us.
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Charles made a video on this topic recently.
Our minds as individuals are being manipulated buy centralized powers.
At the top of the centralized hierarchy is the central banks.
IMF: International Monetary Fund - The global bank where all monetary policy for the world is decided.
UN: United Nations - a front for the IMF bank,
WB: World Bank - a branch office of the IMF bank,
WTO: World Trade Organization,
BIS: Bank of International Settlement,
WEF: World Economic Forum,
CFR: Committee On Foreign Relations,
FED: Federal Reserve,
The central banks control the Central Intelligence Agency
Think of the CIA as the Regime Change Industrial Complex which works to change regime inside the United States as well as regimes in other countries in order to keep the central banks in control of the global money printer.
With some give and take, the CIA controls:
- Information tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook
- The military and military vendors
- The Executive branch including the President, FBI, Justice Dept, Treasury Dept, State Dept, etc.
- Many Congressmen and Senators
- Mainstream news media outlets
- Universities and Primary education agenda
- Company boardrooms via BlackRock and similar.
- Big pharma and the bio labs
- Big agriculture
- Oil and energy
- The space industry
- The prison industry
- Drugs, Prostitution, Child pornography, Blackmail,
While there is not always a direct conspiracy between all of these agencies and industries, aligned incentives are enough to keep them all acting in unison on behalf of the central banks and everybody in the system gets nourished. What we have is an ecosystem or complex adaptive system which capable of feeding itself and growing. It feeds upon the unorganized and unaffiliated masses (that would be us).
Given the above, it is hard to imagine that regular people are fully responsible for their habits of thought or beliefs. In fact, even the people that work within the central bank hierarchy of organizations do not control what they believe. That’s because these people are trapped in an information bubble that feeds them positive and affirming information about their identities and their activities as they plunder the masses.
In order to restore and protect individual sovereignty, including sovereignty of thought, it will be required to dismantle the central banks which print all the counterfeit money that funds all the supporting industries.
With regard to the specific issue of mind control via high reliance on centalized a.i. the answer is to decentralize and open source a.i.as suggested by Charles.
More on that is found at the link here
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First off I appreciate the feedback and responses to keep this conversation going. You both are big thinkers!
COSDpool, I don’t really think difficulty matters. It could even be perceived as an impossible problem by some and we even have to consider that solving this “issue” might be a problem itself. The point is to digest possibilities, reflect on it, and bring awareness to discussions because it is interesting. I encourage you to keep contributing your perspective.To your point that the idea that the best way for people to stop buying and investing in low-quality or manipulated goods and information is for them to break their compulsive consumption habits, opens the discussion on what causes these habits in the first place. I’m personally curious if focusing specifically around research would be worthwhile. Lets suppose AI can now digest every study, grade it on authenticity, and fact check these bogus products. Would this help change the habit and is it enough for what type of manipulation that is potentially present?
Johnshearing, thank you for bringing the video Charles did to my attention. I figured of all people he has been thinking on topics like this for a while. I agree that people are not fully responsible for our habits and beliefs and to restore/protect individual sovereignty is multifaceted. If we just wanted to increase accuracy of information would that even matter? An idea that seems obtainable would be building trust around the scientific communities by improving this accuracy. I know Charles has founded the Hoskinson Center for formal Mathematics to help in these endeavors. My hope is the incentives will align to protect that sovereignty but I must admit I’m not smart enough to even think I know anything.
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Yes, individual sovereignty over one’s beliefs is key to sorting out what is accurate scientific information when the community needs to make good collective decisions.
What do you want?
Do you want accurate information from scientific communities for good collective decisions, or do you want trust in scientific communities for easy manipulation of the masses?
It is just as easy to buy scientists as it is to buy politicians.
We know this is true from climate science, nutrition science, virology science, political science, economic science, data science, etc.
If you want accurate information from scientists then don’t trust them.
Make them prove their case each and every time with uncensored peer review and uncensored public debate. We will never have accurate uncensored scientific data while monetary power is centralized for the reasons mentioned in my previous post.
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What do I want? Discourse.
We all have to deal with these problems and they are not easily solved but they should be discussed. We have powerful tools entering the market daily and it would be an understatement to say they won’t exacerbate these problems. If trust is an issue how do we build it? Where do we start? This project has been a leader in this space and what this technology brings can help power more mechanisms to fend off distrust and unreliability. We may not have the answer now but with enough great minds collaborating we might come up with interesting projects to piggyback off such a powerful tool to help us move in a healthy direction. You’re right to keep an open mind and not believe information just because it is from a scientist and that is why we should debate. If we were to target specifically published research papers to validate credibility I think it would be a start.
Just an example off the top of my head, lets just say we build a project off this platform to publish research under specific guidelines. Take nutrition as an example, the criteria could require studies to be randomized double blind placebo controlled with a minimum sample size. Funding providers and authors would also be required for transparency. Cited usage of the papers could be directly tied to it as well for transparency and authenticity. If a product makes claims using such a paper and they are not tied in then immediate red flags, if they are then there is transparency and it opens public debate. This might be a bad example but it’s late and just off the cuff.
I think the more we toss in ideas, awareness, and potential solutions the closer all of us will get to being able to trust information from platforms like what I mentioned with higher confidence.
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We get rid of the notion of “trust”.
The whole point of blockchain is to eliminate trust.
Blockchains are trustless technology.
You don’t have to trust anybody to know the state of the Cardano ledger or if your smart contract will execute as intended.
If you want good collective decisions then don’t trust any one source of truth.
Let each individual have access to independent research and data, let them debate, then let all people decide what is true, in each particular case, for themselves.
A consensus will emerge which is highly likely to be a useful model of the truth.
Even double blind testing done with the best of intentions can often disagree with other high quality double blind testing on the same subject. This is because the full context surrounding the tests may vary in subtle ways that the researchers consider unlikely to affect the results. So even in the best of conditions it is not possible to trust any one study. Rather we must rely on many.
I have been thinking about a decentralized collective decision making system which uses a randomly selected jury of domain experts to decide what is true for best governance. It would run on Cardano with documents stored on the IPFS and with proof of storage managed by the Midnight blockchain. I would imagine the same system could be applied to getting consensus on peer reviewed science that ordinary citizens can trust with better outcomes than can be obtained using centralized sources of truth.
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I agree. Don’t trust. Verify. And, harness the community to do the verification and reach consensus.
I think it is possible to build better social, information sharing, platforms, where people own their ideas and data. We can harness the community “hive mind” to verify this data, do research, and investigate hypotheses. With proper incentives designed and built into the system, I believe such a platform is possible.
This video by Charles provided some good ideas about design:
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