This particular issue is “vexing” to put it mildly. It’s nightmare fuel to be honest, because when you start trying to think of solutions to deep fakes and fake

This particular issue is “vexing” to put it mildly. It’s nightmare fuel to be honest, because when you start trying to think of solutions to deep fakes and fake news, you very very quickly, run up against the assumed norms of our enlightenment era ideals. Free speech, expression, and government control. Because it’s clear, that there’s no private solution to essentially an evolutionary war between carnivore (malicious humans) and herbivore(people who don’t want to be manipulated). Right now, the Chinese total control model is the model that’s working, and while on HN we may find it abhorrent, people in high places are being forced to make pragmatic choices. For them a Chinese styled information system will win out. To prevent this, I think it’s increasingly time to re-examine our norms on information and expression. In general, taking a step back - human society (markets, media, reporters, books, news) are effectively a giant solution to finding out what is “true” and what is “something else”. We are excellent at solving these problems, we build families (parents are decision makers and know what information and implications make sense), clans (what is ideal for this group of people with similar genes I can trust), businesses (contracted people with relatively aligned interests), and more. You get the drift. So the question resolves to: How, do we organize ourselves, to verify information, to at least keep parity with the verification rates before the internet era. The key difference, is the mass production of information/content. The rate of content generation outstrips the ability to verify. This last part will not change. We will always lose as an information society, if we get into a pure verification war with computer generated information. This leads to the first conclusion: 1) clear measures to control the rate of generation of fake data. to be blunt: this means jail. Punitive and clear response to stop this behavior, across borders. Here’s where a decent chunk of HN will be aghast. This is what I meant by our values coming into conflict with the necessities of the solution. Which brings us to problem 2/ addendum to solution 1. 2) who watches the watchers? If govt has the power to punish people for “fake news” how do we know that’s not misused for “inconvenient news”. Well, the weak solution that presents itself is a fire walled agency, with guaranteed ability to be funded, in order to seek out and identify manipulation and spread of faked information. Hopefully, this agency won’t crumble on day 1, on the inherent contradictions of its role and responsibilities. Some structure of this sort, gives us a pathway through the near future to deal with this issue. Hopefully, it can be used to buy the time to solve the issue we are facing. The irony, of advocating for a ministry of truth, in order to save the truth, is not lost on me. But unless action is taken to stop propaganda, mass produced information creation, then it is a guarantee that our old human ways of assessing information will fail. The only option which will be left on the table is dystopia, or some bizarre world where nothing and anything is true.