Comment by thingification | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thingification | Hacker News Reader

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I think you describe the conventional wisdom well here.

But: are those really the only options? Paranoid stop-the-world wishful thinking or all-new-trends-are-inevitable?

I realise I'm almost certainly wildly misrepresenting your point of view with the latter label! I don't really mean to ascribe it to you. But I think the conversation often ends up tacitly as a debate between those two positions, both of which are mistakes. But one other option -- as an example -- is to find more complicated ways to stop doing <bad use of tech>.

A striking historical example to me because it's so old it can hardly be said to have been an invention that needed to be responded to -- rather just an apparent invitable fact of life: For the longest time, it seems everyday brutal violence on a level we find hard to imagine was common. At the time, that would have been obviously inevitable. Nothing else had ever happened. Then it basically stopped -- turns out it never was inevitable. Why? We didn't for example ban knives as a technology, but we did a lot of things over the centuries that, to a good numerical approximation, stopped us using them for violence (banning them in certain situations is only one, I suspect not the most important and maybe not even necessary).

I think in many ways, the continued evolution of technology will turn back the clock on progress in other areas of our lives.

In ages past, impersonating another person was not nearly as difficult as it is today. Advances in identity verification and such have eliminated a certain class of problems. The emergence of deepfakes doesn’t necessarily introduce “new” problems, it just resets the progress on some very old ones.

Assuming this is solved not by banning the tech but by making progress elsewhere, some pretty worrisome implications come with that. One antidote to deepfakes would be even more progress on identity verification and tracking the source of digital media for purposes of authentication / validity.

It’s not hard to imagine the negatives in such improvements at a time where we’re already tracked far too much.

I think a more ideal development would be a return to pre-tech habits. Meeting people in person. Less reliance on virtual communication, etc. But one need only look at the backlash against returning to the office to see that such a move would require something truly existential.

I suspect you are right in the long run, but I’m curious what other factors or forces might nullify the threat introduced by this tech in the short term, or if things really have to run off the rails before people decide that fundamental changes in how we interface with tech are required.

> I think in many ways, the continued evolution of technology will turn back the clock on progress in other areas of our lives.

I don't disagree that it can have that effect.

Just to note: this use of "turn back the clock" is quite distinct from "turn back the clock on technology".

> Assuming this is solved not by banning the tech but by making progress elsewhere, some pretty worrisome implications come with that.

My point was not that we can make progress elsewhere to solve resulting problems (we can) but that we can also not use the technology in the "inevitable" bad way. It happens!

> One antidote to deepfakes would be even more progress on identity verification and tracking the source of digital media for purposes of authentication / validity.

One other antidote (of many I'm sure) would be to do less identity verification in the first place.

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