Reality Under Siege
It was bad, AI will make it SO much worse.
This Substack is about the nuts and bolts for small units involved in online conflict, what Arquilla and Ronfeldt describe as Netwar. My intent was to provide a foundation in the first month, then start poking around in actual problems. There are chat rooms where my peers and I discuss the topic de jure and last weekend’s conversation seems like something worth surfacing here and now.
Artificial intelligence is being employed to create alternate realities. This is a problem beyond whole of society, it’s a hazard for our entire species. We’ve always had those who have been naturally inclined to seek such things, our mystics, our shamans. But they sought it, alone or in small groups, going into what Robert M. Pirsig called “the high country of the mind”.
They find a grimoire or a guide, after an arduous search, or maybe some strange luck. They load their pack, guessing at what they’ll need, then they walk off the edge of the map. The ones who manage to return do so by a different path, and they went knowing not making it back is an inherent hazard of any such journey.
But now people who are not just unprepared, but who are entirely unaware that such things are possible, and who would never choose such a course of action, are being dropped off somewhere past the edge of the map.
Attention Conservation Notice: Cult weirdos, hippy bullshit, YouTube astrophysics grifters, and bloody insurrection ahead.
BBC Study:
There’s plenty of writing out there on the occult and a good bit of how alternate reality games can create a fertile ground for such things. Given the rise of Qanon this is a broad problem that we have to address, but for today I’m going to vent on one little corner of the problem: junk science channels built with artificial intelligence.
Today in discussion one of the topics was YouTube junk AI channels. There was a study by BBC in the U.K. And Thailand where kids were shown absolute nonsense, then interviewed about it.
How does this work for well read adults?
I pay attention to physics, from the quantum to the cosmological scale. There are always good articles about this on phys.org and I enjoy channels like Astrum and Dr. Becky, and PBS Space Time. I know there are three big problems in astrophysics today. These are:
We have no quantum physics model of gravity.
Dark matter shapes galaxies but we don't know what it is.
Our two methods of dating the universe are diverging.
Bullshit Detected:
Shortly after watching that BBC video, this Secrets of Cosmos rot appeared in my feed.
A breathless sort of tag line there, eh? But just look at the content.
What do you see here?
Betelgeuse is going supernova and it’s happening next Tuesday, in terms of cosmological time. So … maybe I’ll live to see it, or maybe the grandchildren of those born in 2023 will. Something IS happening, but the over the top language … no.
Signals are terrifying scientists? The keywords INSANE and TERRIFYING are an instant block from me, those are hot keywords right now that I mentally translate to BULLSHIT when I see them.
And the second alien life video? There are serious, sober studies about aspects of identifying alien civilizations, or calculations as to how rare intelligent life might be. But if you’re reporting on science the clickbait questions are SO inappropriate.
Impact:
I had eleven credits of college physics, phys.org is my bedtime reading, and professionally working against disinformation has equipped me to deal with this. How would sixteen year old me in that first physics class handle material like this?
Badly.
With no background and not understanding the tell of a machine generated voice, I'd have watched all of that stuff. And having spent some energy on Psychology of Intelligence analysis, I know that when deception is expected there's a filter layer between collectors and analysts. We’ve lost that, thanks to the y’all come publishing model of the internet, the intentional destruction of newsrooms, and the advent of preprint services.
Preprints:
Studies can appear on arXiv and only have to get past moderation, not peer review. But if you look at the list of preprint repositories there’s an interesting trend. I made a quick table of the ones created this century that are still in operation. The bulk of the new services out there occurred not during the pandemic, but just before, with two thirds of them happening while Trump was in office.
“Donald Trump causes preprint services” is mindlessly simplistic. But there was something driving that burst of activity, and having just noticed this while making this table, I’m going to be on the lookout for meta-studies on this.
But here is the important takeaway:
Bullshit medical studies laundered through preprint services, which later failed badly in peer review, were treated as valid science by the press.
Disinformation has been laundered through preprint services. And a whole bunch of people died because of that.
Horizon of Horrors:
The far horizon of how bad things like this go? Take a look at the Qanon Casualties subreddit with its 267k subscribers. Divorces, parents cutting off their parents from grandkids, older teens walking on eggshells and sneaking out to get vaccinated. Permanent breaks are so common that “going NC” is shorthand for it.
There are a lot of common features between ISIS and Qanon. The linked article reports “The beliefs aren’t solid, but they usually include the baseless theories that Democrats are running a cannibalistic sex cult and trafficking children.” This is a good time for you to “do your own research”. Google results when you put ISIS and Qanon in the same search yield a lot of serious reporting about it.
The child sex trafficking/torture stuff is a painfully thin reboot of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And for those who truly believe, such belief comes with tacit permission to slaughter those involved. Just think of the children.
We’d like to think we’re a lot more advanced than the Rwanda of thirty years ago. But we are not. We’re being led down the same path they were and we’ll get a bloodbath if we don’t DO something about it.
Conclusion:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -Voltaire.
Now have a look at what retiring Senator Mitt Romney has revealed about his Republican colleagues.
What would you have done on …
Let reading this be an inflection point for you. You no longer get to say “I didn’t know.” If you have to make an excuse in the future, it will be “I was afraid to act”, just like those Republicans Romney described, on the day they could have ended America’s second civil war when the body count was just five.