Weapons of Mass Deception
In this story, we discuss the dangers of generative artificial intelligence and learn to recognize two kinds of digital truth: Centralized and Decentralized.
When you receive Spam email offering you free money from a Nigerian prince, how long does it take you to delete it?
Or what about Click Bait and Headline Traps? Those are the articles in your newsfeeds that seem like interesting stories until you scroll through 15 ads and realize you were tricked. The humans who designed those deceptions intentionally stole seconds of attention from us for profit.
Here are a few more forms of digital deception that already plague the Internet:
Deepfakes - manipulated videos or images that deceive viewers into believing false information
Phishing scams - emails to obtain sensitive information, such as passwords or credit card numbers, by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity
Tech support scams - fraudulent phone calls from tech support that obtains access to the victim's computer
Romance scams - tricks victims into falling in love with a fake persona to get money or confidential information
Ransomware - encrypts a victim's files to make them inaccessible, then demands payment for the decryption key
Fake news - misleading news that is deliberately spread to manipulate public opinion
Auction fraud - fake transactions in online auctions where the seller does not deliver or the buyer does not pay
Malware - software designed to steal confidential data
Investment scams - fraudulent schemes that promise high returns on investment, but do not deliver
Social engineering - psychological manipulation of individuals to perform actions that are not in their best interest
Click farms - groups of people hired to artificially boost traffic on a website, social media platform, or mobile app
In 2023, Cybersecurity Ventures estimated the total cost of these cybercrimes at EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS. That was 9% of the global economy that year. Remember all those stories of bandits and bank robbers in America’s Wild, Wild West? Well, the Internet also has no laws, no sheriffs, and no persistent identities. The Internet is basically the Wild, Wild West 2.0.
Have you been victimized by one of these cybercrimes? Email me, or share your story with us in the comments below.
Weapons of Mass Deception
The Internet is already teeming with deceptive behavior, but it’s about to get much, much worse. The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence will soon make it impossible to know what is real and what is fake online. The newest generative-AI models already have superhuman intelligence and many of them are open source for anyone to try. When cybercriminals incorporate these new models into their existing scams, we will be playing “4-D chess” against supercomputers whose only goal is to steal all our time and money.
Deep fakes will become normal, even for legitimate companies. By the year 2030, the Disney app will be capable of streaming individualized Disney movies just for you. The app’s generative-AI will still stream classics like Guardians of the Galaxy, but it will also provide each customer with a prompt. You will be able to ask the Disney app,
“Imagine a new Avengers movie where they fight any of the original Jack Kirby villains. Have a 30-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger play Thor, but write his lines as a sassy Jamaican woman.”
You can watch your trailer, give the Disney-AI more notes, watch your improved trailer, and then watch a new Disney movie every day. You may have to pay money to license Arnold Schwarzenegger’s digital likeness, but if you GENERATE a new Disney movie good enough to get 50k views online, Disney might actually pay you. 🤑
You might even make enough money to license Brad Pitt’s digital likeness. Brad Pitt is so good looking that he will probably star in new movies for the next three thousand years. Carrie Fisher has already starred as Princess Leia in a Star Wars movie that was written after she was dead. 😵🎭
Whatever generative-AI does for Disney, it will do even more for porn because the Porn Industry has always been at the forefront of digital technologies. The global demand for porn led to major innovations in:
online payments
video compression
buffering
adaptive bitrate streaming, and
data center infrastructure.
If you think Disney is big, porn is 30% of all the traffic on the Internet right now. Porn is bigger than Disney, Netflix, Max, Paramount, and Warner Brothers Discovery combined. For example, in 2018, people spent FIVE BILLION hours watching Pornhub. That’s 665 centuries of time on just one porn site, in just one year. Here are a few more astounding porn metrics:
Approximately 90% of men and 60% of women have watched porn, read porn, or played sexually explicit video games, which means porn stars are statistically the most famous people on Earth.
But that’s all about to change.
With generative-AI, the Porn Industry can avoid the expensive production costs of professional orgies, and stream individualized porn directly to each person. They already have all the training data they need. The porn computers know which keywords each person searches for, every video they have ever watched, when they paused, and exactly when they finished. Gross pun intended. 🤢
Fortunately or unfortunately, everything in real life that isn’t already fakeable, will be fakeable in the future too. For example, De Beers and other natural diamond miners campaigned against “cultured diamonds” for decades. But in 2018, De Beers reversed course, investing $100M to launch their own cultured diamond brand, Lightbox. So natural diamonds are following the exact same economic path as natural pearls. The battle between cultured pearls and natural pearls started much earlier in history and today 100% of pearls used in jewelry are cultured. That’s because cultured pearls are cheaper, have higher quality, and lower environmental impact. Here is Maksud Agadjani to give you the truth about lab diamonds. Hint: they are better than natural diamonds. (6 mins)
Everything in the future will be “cultured”, even our food. Why buy the cow when you can get the tenderloin for free? Here is a short video to learn more about the future of meat. (3 mins)
When I say everything in the future will be fakeable, I really mean replicable, and the implications of this are way, way crazier than you are imagining.
Way crazier.
Quantum mechanics means our entire universe is made out of information, so there is no theoretical limit to the kinds of information generative-AI can produce in the future. The easiest way to imagine what I mean is to start by thinking of electric generators—the kind that we have been using for the last 100 years, invented by Nikola Tesla. 🤩
When you turn the crank of an A/C Generator, it produces electrons, but those electrons are pretty dumb. Generative-AI is actually the next evolution of this technology. When you turn the crank of an “AI Generator”, it produces electrons, but they are way, way smarter. AI Generators produce electrons in a highly specific order that represent “tokens” of information. Our current AI Generators reliably produce tokens of:
words (ChatGPT)
images (Midjourney)
audio (Suno)
video (Runway)
3D simulations (NVidia)
computer code (Github Copilot)
steering inputs for self-driving cars (Tesla)
novel proteins to improve our health (AlphaFold)
financial trading strategies (Numerai)
These tokens all represent digital information, but again, there is no theoretical limit to the kinds of information AI Generators will produce. So the future of this technology will be “Quantum AI Generators”, which will transform digital information directly into quantum reality. You can think of these machines as “atomic printers” or “atomic replicators”. When we finally master quantum mechanics, children will be able to generate 24-carat gold bars from cheap atomic replicators that harness Zero Point Energy.
I know that sounds like magic, but any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here is a short video discussing the future of atomic replicators. (5 mins)
@alienfans: This technology may already exist on Earth. If you see a UAP, the ones that have seams and rivets were reverse engineered by humans. The UAP with no seams and rivets were atomically printed by an intelligence way smarter than us. Here is Shawn Ryan’s interview of Dr. Steven Greer to learn more about the differences between manmade UAP and interstellar UAP. (287 mins) 🛸
@alienhaters: The US Government has already acknowledged the recovery of extraterrestrial spaceships and the biological entities who piloted them.
If you can’t imagine our government possessing secret technology that’s way ahead of its time, remember Alan Turing invented computers at Bletchley Park in WWII, but the Allied Forces didn’t declassify most of his work until the 1990’s. Isn’t it likely that the US military also has a few more 50-year secrets?
The point of all these crazy examples is that the universe is made out of information and anything that is made out of information is replicable—including gold, diamonds, and filet mignons. I know I’m blending information and reality here, but that’s my point. Reality is information and information is reality. It’s time you start thinking about our universe that way BECAUSE IT’S TRUE.
We all live inside a quantum computer. 💯
Finding The Truths
The most popular AI generator on the Internet today is ChatGPT, which has 250 million users each week. As a result of all those interactions, ChatGPT adds 4 billion words to the Internet every day. That doesn’t include all the tokens from Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, the News Industry, or AI translators. According to a recent study by Amazon Web Services, 57% of all the content on the Internet today is AI generated. 😳
When cybercriminals get all their “attack-AI” online, how many more words and images per day do you think those models will add? Law enforcement experts in the EU predict 90% of the Internet will be AI generated by 2026.
Finding the truth in the exponentially multiplying noise of AI generators will become ever more difficult over time, so how do we find digital information that we can trust?
@philosophers: There’s no easy answer, especially considering we spent the first two chapters of this book proving objective truth is impossible in our universe. We proved it physically and philosophically. There is no such thing as truth on the Internet because there is no such thing as truth in reality—all the way down to the Uncertainty Principle of quantum mechanics. There is a small measure of faith in every action we take. It’s inescapable. So instead of searching for the truth, we need to search for digital information that has the “highest probability of the truth”, which is information that has the lowest amount of Uncertainty.
Here are the two questions I use when determining the veracity of any digital information:
How improbable is this information compared to Chance?
How difficult would it be to replicate this information?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but there are two types of “digital truths” that are very, very difficult to replicate:
Centralized Truth — is information that comes from only one expert provider. Sources of centralized truth know something that no one else knows. For example, only Google knows what everyone searches for on the Internet. That “single source” data is so valuable, that it generated $282 billion dollars of advertising revenue in 2022. Knowing information that no one else knows creates huge economic opportunities. Wall Street hedge funds use satellites in space to monitor traffic patterns in Walmart parking lots so their trading algorithms make smarter predictions about their quarterly revenue. Those satellites produce centralized truth.
Decentralized Truth — is information from many disparate sources that all agree on the same story. Sources of decentralized truth know something that everyone else knows. I think of this as “Bayesian Truth” because it relies on repeatedly sampling the same data point. While any one sample could be inauthentic, the higher the frequency of the samples, the more true the datapoint is. A good example of this are Yelp reviews. Yelp is an app that allows restaurant patrons to leave reviews about their dining experience on a scale of 0-5 stars. When I travel to new cities, I don’t ask just one person for restaurant recommendations, I read what everyone is saying. If a restaurant has 5000 Yelp reviews that average 4.7 stars, then I will probably like it too. Yelp is also useful as a menu. Whenever I eat in restaurants, I scroll down through the Yelp photos instead of reading the menu. If half the photos are Shanghai Soup Dumplings, then I get the dumplings. That's also a decentralized truth.
@travelers: I even use the decentralized truth on Yelp when I rent houses on Airbnb. Knowing where to rent a house within a city will have a tremendous effect on your experience. So I keep a Yelp window open that shows the best restaurants as little dots on the map of that city. The tightest clusters are where I wanna be. Those areas will be a little nicer, which means the neighborhoods will be a little safer. Expensive real estate is extremely difficult to replicate, which is why wealthy people love it so much. Expensive real estate is also a decentralized truth. My other rule of thumb for renting houses is to always rent near an H&M store. After renting houses in more than 250 cities, it seems like whoever chooses their retail locations always picks the most walkable streets. 🚶➡️
Once I pick a neighborhood, I then use Yelp to pick the best bakery or coffee shop that I want to walk to each morning. I am so curious about our world that my family has tried most of the best bakeries, coffee shops, and ice cream shops in 45 states, 6 Canadian provinces, and 35 European countries. That’s not hyperbole—my Google timeline only sniffs out about 60% of the places I visit.
Like we discussed in the first chapter on philosophy, my goal for this book is to teach you how to find the truth—the Fundamental Frequency of Life. That’s why all of the important information comes from Wikipedia, ChatGPT, or the smartest research scientists on Earth. Those sources of information have the lowest amount of Uncertainty:
Wikipedia is the best source of Decentralized Truth from humans because their editing process seeks wide consensus. Wikipedia knows what everyone knows.
ChatGPT is the best source of Decentralized Truth from computers because it’s trained on Wikipedia, social media, and all our books. ChatGPT knows what everyone knows.
The world’s smartest research scientists are the best sources of Centralized Truths because their expensive science experiments enable them to know what no one else knows.
So the information in my book, The Theory of Every Uncertainty, has the lowest Uncertainty of any information on the Internet. I didn’t charge you to read this book. There are no ads, no click bait, and no fake news. I’m simply telling you the most amount of truth I can because I genuinely care about you knowing it. And I’m simultaneously proving to you that it is more true than anything else you can possibly read online. 🤔
@christians: In chapter 8, Quantum Christianity, we’ll see why the Bible is probably the best source of centralized truth from outside our universe. And we’ll use math, science, and archaeology to prove it. 😉
Information Networks
Now that we can recognize centralized and decentralized truths when digital information is static (which means standing still), let’s see what happens to when digital information moves. Here are a few ways that information moves throughout our world:
person to person — texts, emails, and videos
computer to computer — FTP, XML, and JSON
computers to humans — push notifications, emails, web pages, and apps
humans to computers — keystrokes, taps, and voice commands
Whenever people and computers share information, they create an Information Network. My favorite book to learn about information networks is called, The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson.
Here’s the description,
From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory—concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions—can transform our understanding of both the past and the present.
This book is fantastic. It is so much easier to read than this 63-word sentence from the publisher. 😂
@bookworms: The Square and the Tower shows how network theory affects pretty much everything in our world, everywhere, all the time. It reminds me of the book, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West. You can’t unread Scale. Once you know the principles in that book, you will see them everywhere.
I also put Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies in that category. Whenever I learn anything new about our world, that information usually fits neatly into the frameworks of these three books.
The Square and the Tower are Niall Ferguson’s terms for decentralized and centralized information networks, respectively:
The square is a Horizontal Network of people who make decisions together, like voting in an election or reviewing restaurants on Yelp. Everyone is a peer in the square.
The tower is a Vertical Network of people who make decisions according to rank, often starting with a single source. The President of the United States is the head of a vertical network of information. In many way, the President decides the truth.
Each actor on an information network uses information to make decisions, but it’s not just the information that affects their decision. When, where, how, why, and from whom the information was transmitted is just as important as the information itself. Maybe more. Information theorist, Marshall McLuhan, coined the phrase, “the medium is the message” to describe this phenomenon.
In 1962, McLuhan wrote,
The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.
Advancements in communication technologies have slowly transformed television from a vertical network of information into a horizontal one, so let’s use the history of television to see how the medium affects the message.
Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, Americans could only watch three channels on television because the cost to create a station was prohibitively expensive. This centralized the truth for the entire nation. Every American, receiving the same news, from the same source, at the same time, had a huge influence on our culture and our politics. Americans during this time all had the same haircuts, listened to the same music, and wore the same clothes.
Walter Cronkite signed off his broadcast each night with, “That’s the way it is”.
Here’s Walter Cronkite to explain why the President of NBC hated his famous sign off. (1 min)
Walter Cronkite delivered centralized truth to an entire nation. The price of the medium forced television and newspaper editors to remain objective because both sides of the political aisle read the same information at the same time. Our politicians still fought back then, but at least they agreed on the facts of the case. When the truth is centralized, even what’s wrong is right.
Unfortunately, the converse is also true.
When truth is decentralized, even what’s right is wrong. When the cost of content distribution is low, the quality of the content goes down. Information shifts from facts to opinion, which is exactly what we see in our news and social media today. Information is currently cheap and getting cheaper.
It took about 50 years for television to make the journey from vertical network of information to horizontal network of information. In the 70’s and 80’s, the UHF antenna increased the total number of channels from 3 to about 10. By 1990, coaxial cable added 30 more channels for about 60% of American households. By 2000, digital cable added hundreds of more channels. Today, there are 32 million channels on YouTube that generate commercial revenue. YouTube has a “preacher” for every truth and they compete against each other to deliver it.
Compared to the 1950’s, our hairstyles have diversified, our music has diversified, our clothes have diversified, and even our politics have diversified. This is why dictators like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un have to centralize control over their country’s media—they need to control the truth. Fortunately for America, decentralized democracies are so inefficient that they are incredibly difficult to commandeer. When President T***p tried to hack our democracy with Coordinated Deception, his lies never got more than 50% Reach. The decentralization of power and information in America is the main reason we are so antifragile.
@cybernerds: Hacking a democracy of 350M people is just as difficult as hacking a blockchain with 350M nodes. That’s a very expensive 51% attack.
Also, the world laughed when Kevin Kelly predicted we would have 100,000 channels on television one day. Now there are 32 million. If you haven’t read him, start with his book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.
@colbertlateshow: Robbing President T***p of his digital mentions each day is funny every time I see it. “T***p” and “isPotato” are pound-for-pound the most efficient jokes ever told. Two jokes in just 13 letters is absolutely amazing. “Absolutely amazing” needs more letters than that. 😁
Effusively Diffusive Technology
When new technologies are invented, control over them is typically centralized by the inventors and financiers. Then, as in the case of television, incremental improvements to that technology slowly decentralize their power over time.
This pattern is easy to see in computer science because it happens so frequently. In the 1950’s, computing was so expensive that it was centralized on Mainframe computers, which required users to login from remote terminals.
As the cost of microprocessors came down, computing decentralized into the personal computers (PC) in our homes. As the costs of creating computers went down, the price of searching them all went up. So Google centralized computing power again and users went back to remote logins—this time called a web browser.
As our battery and wireless technology improved, mobile phones decentralized computing power again. Now there is a personal computer in each person’s pocket. That’s why the next big centralization in computer science isn’t the metaverse, it’s ChatGPT. Users are already flocking to the new remote login—this time called a chatbot prompt. The prohibitive costs to make ChatGPT and other frontier AI models is similar to the prohibitive costs of building a television station in 1930. Only a handful of companies can afford to do it. So this means ChatGPT is like Walter Cronkite 2.0. There are 250M people asking ChatGPT questions about the universe each week and it is answering every one of them from the same dataset.
@historynerds: For more history of computers and the Internet, read The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. Bell Labs invented the transistor, automated switching, Unix, C programming language, the FFT algorithm, photovoltaic cells, fiber optic cable, Information Theory, and Game Theory. Shockley, Shannon, and von Neumann all worked there together. American Telephone and Telegraph was the Internet for almost a century. 🙏
We close this story on digital trust with money because money is literally information.
When you hand $1,000 cash to the teller at your bank, what you receive in exchange is an increase to your digital account balance. That’s it. Most of the money in the world is completely electronic—it’s kept in bank account databases and corporate capitalization tables, which are often just spreadsheets. 😬
Today, the most cutting-edge finance is called Decentralized Finance (DeFi), but the technology of money has been decentralizing for centuries. A thousand years ago, almost all commercial finance was under the centralized control of a king. A government’s power to tax (aka the local monopoly on violence without repercussion) was the only credit strong enough to build bridges and fund wars.
Sovereign control over money and credit first started to crack in 1300 CE when a Florentino merchant, named Amatino Manucci, invented Double Entry Accounting. You know the annoying slip of paper that you get when you buy a donut? Well that was actually a technological invention. (1 min)
In 1300, the newly invented receipts increased trust between merchant banks, which allowed them to transfer funds without actually transferring physical gold. As a result, Florence became the hub of a burgeoning merchant bank network that spread credit and liquidity all over Europe. The banks in Florence even managed the revenues for the Pope, who had the largest revenue stream in the world at the time. Whenever I walk around Florence and admire all the Michelangelo and Donatello statues that decorate their city I think, “Wow, receipts were such a big deal”. 🧾
The center of world finance migrated from Florence to London around 1600 with the formation of the East India Company. The “decentralizing financial technology” this time was called the Joint Stock Company. This invention allowed non-sovereign people to pool their capital to fund projects and expeditions that were previously only affordable by kings. For example, back in 1492 when Christopher Columbus went looking for financing, the King of Spain was the only guy on Earth rich enough to sail 3 fully loaded warships off the end of the Earth just to see what happens. 🐲
The Joint Stock Company allowed the British elite to invest heavily in global trade networks. British colonies sprouted up all over the Earth and produced economic returns on their Venture Capital for centuries. Venture capitalists today still call their profit “the carry” because those profits were originally measured in tonnage of spices. The British didn’t liberate their weakest colonies until 1960, which is why 18 different countries on Earth all share that year of independence. That's almost 10% of all countries.
Global finance decentralized even further with the Limited Liabilities Act of 1855. In a joint stock company, the shareholders are liable for all debts accrued by the company, so only the wealthiest individuals can afford to carry the pro rata share of liability. The Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) formally limits shareholder liability to just the assets held by or pledged to the company. This enabled a much wider range of individuals to participate in private equity, which created even more liquidity in the economy. Fortunately, the LLC was invented just in time to finance the Second Industrial Revolution.
The LLC may have even caused it.
Today, Bitcoin and other DeFi technologies are looking to disintermediate the central banking system altogether. In a central banking system, trust is provided by the state because people trust whatever denomination they can pay their taxes in. That’s as liquid as money gets. But with DeFi currencies, there is no central bank to trust because their blockchain technologies distribute trust across the entire network. So:
An account balance at a bank is a centralized truth on a vertical network of information regulated by the state.
An account balance on a blockchain is a decentralized truth on a horizontal network of information regulated by peers.
Unfortunately, blockchains are not a panacea solution for global finance because the decentralizing technology is extremely expensive to operate. Each transaction on the Bitcoin Network consumes over $100 of electricity. The Bitcoin Network needs more power every year than all the people of Sweden, including all their saunas.
@americans: For now, we will just have to settle our taxes with the US Dollar, which is anonymous to transact, fungible, and has no history of who possessed each one.
Just imagine if we could pay our taxes in Bitcoin. We could figure out which of our tax dollars purchased the bombs and bullets that destroyed some poor foreign neighborhood, and which of our tax dollars purchased a new heart for some old person 1000 miles away who ate cheeseburgers and milkshakes their entire life. 🫀
Continue reading…
Table of Contents
HUGE THANKS 🙏
to the sponsors of this story. Your support helps us reach new academics, scholars, and scientists all around the world.
If this story was helpful to you, please consider supporting our foundation. All your gifts are tax deductible.
Help us improve this story. Send me an email or leave a comment.
What did you love the most?
What did you hate the most?
What surprised you the most?
What confused you the most?