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 eve

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.