Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

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Twenty years ago people would fall for a convincing email, or a social media profile with a name and photo. Eventually people started to adjust their natural assumptions about what's trustworthy.

I think the same will happen here. People will learn not to trust audio and video for anything important. Cryptographic trust will become the only strong trust.

I think corporations and governments won't have trouble making this transition. There will be stragglers that learn the lesson the hard way, but everyone will move forward eventually.

What's more concerning is the implication for news and crime, where there inherently can't be a carefully built system of authentication. Videos recorded from phones will cease to mean anything. Maybe all media will stop being admissible in court.

We had a world like that around 150 years ago; trust was purely based on people. There was no general way to capture proof of events. We'll regress to that, but maybe the world won't stop.

People still fall for "convincing" emails and social media profiles with a name and a photo. I work tech support at my university, and we regularly have to deal with faculty clicking on things they shouldn't, or not clicking on things they should. I also do some work for a local non-profit and a month ago two employees came uncomfortably close to costing us thousands.

Cryptographic trust won't help much either unless it is packaged and presented in the right way to the end user - it's basically advanced black magic to most people. I would love to have cryptographic verification setup for the non-profit's communication so that they can have some guarantee of legitimacy, but first I have to figure out how to make it fit into their workflow and not require them to actually take any action.

It's important to keep in mind that we have some distorted sampling. I would guess that most if not all of the people on HN are technical to some degree, so we may tend to have a bit of a bubble. We are a pathetically, uncomfortably small minority.

Never, ever, ever rely on humans doing the right thing if you can help it, whether in the form of an individual, a corporation, or a government.

I did say "started to adjust their natural assumptions". Clearly some people haven't yet; perhaps for some people who didn't grow up with the internet, it's not really possible. But we as a society are adapting, is the point.

You vastly underestimate the difference between non-evidence (which held back civilization plenty) with fake evidence. People will easily believe lies.

I'm not saying it's a good thing; it's a clear downgrade. I'm just saying, civilization functioned.

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