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Comment by samcodes | Hacker News Reader

Looking ahead 10-20 years, I don't see how anyone born from 2015 onwards has any solid concept of reality the way I feel I know it. Between things like this and AR, I feel like "real" vs "simulated" will seem to the AR natives to be a pedantic distinction... Like how my parents still distinguish between "having met someone" and "someone I have talked to on the internet."

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I wonder if eventually the SNR of electronic content will simply be so low that any communication of nontrivial value will simply take place over physical channels (e.g. face-to-face and trust networks), as it has for all of human history but the modern era. Or we truly embrace cryptography as a people and use it to build such networks of trust in the digital realm (e.g. news videos cryptographically signed by reporters and news organizations).

Speaking of which, the notion that one can possess irrefutable audio-visual evidence of an event is also a very recent one. Until the 19th century absolutely any news item traveled word-of-mouth (or ink) through trust networks and were absolutely subject to manipulation.

> Like how my parents still distinguish between "having met someone" and "someone I have talked to on the internet."

I am not sure that that distinction is really gone.

Where'd you two meet? On the internet.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that because such an exchange is plausible there is no meaningful distinction between online and in-person communication.

I really don't think there is much of a difference anymore. I remember meeting people online and hanging out with them (talking, working on projects together, playing games, etc) and it honestly didn't feel any different than meeting someone in person and doing the same thing despite the fact that I have never seen some of these people in person.

I find it especially difficult to differentiate a meaningful distinction between the two when my interactions with people go from in person to online or vice versa. We just do the same stuff we did normally, albeit maybe those things occur in different settings such as at a computer instead of face to face at a restaurant or wherever.

If this technology merges with conversational AI improving, I think we could be in trouble. I remember that article that used machine learning on someone's chat messages who passed away and had some interesting conversations based on what the machine learning process could create that wasn't perfect but somewhat believable. Pair that with this tech and we are on the road to passing the Turing Test.

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