It's fascinating how brief the era of "hard evidence" promises to be. We're accustomed to having nearly-unfakeable, easily disseminated documentation of key eve

It's fascinating how brief the era of "hard evidence" promises to be. We're accustomed to having nearly-unfakeable, easily disseminated documentation of key events, but it's a very recent advance. Photography as evidence (what's apparently called the "truth claim" of photographs) is perhaps 100 years old; the Kodak Brownie provided mass access to quick-capture images with too much detail to easily fake, and the Leica enabled systematic photojournalism. Near-universal access to cameras is only ~30 years old, with cheap digital cameras and then cellphones making photo evidence near-mandatory for bold claims. Audio recording as evidence is ~70 years old, with portable tape recorders producing on-demand records of speech with hard-to-fake fidelity. Video recording as evidence also starts ~70 years ago, but became a systematic form of documentation only ~40 years ago with camcorders, and phones only reached widespread high-fidelity access about 20 years ago. Meanwhile, photographic digital fakes have been plausible for about 20 years (less for human faces). Audio fakes are similar - extremely convincing fakery is newer (10 years?), but the baseline level of proof was never as high. And now video is less than a decade from compromise. I don't think the simple loss of evidence will be quite as serious a crisis as some people expect. The era before "hard evidence" is still on the edge of living memory in the US, and areas with less access to expensive technology never entirely developed that expectation. We'll adjust back to weighting source more and fidelity less, though that comes at a price in centralized control. But we're in for a very rough adjustment period where easily-faked content is taken as clear truth. Beyond that, there's still a major open question about the psychological impact of these fakes. We might adjust back to a society that doesn't rely on photo proof, but there's no clear precedent for how people will be affected by untrusted but gut-level convincing content. Stories of actors being harassed over unlikeable roles suggest that we may yet be pretty impacted by visualizations we know aren't accurate.