[ryandvm]

I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility.

Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

[ethbro]

The Vox article is also making a nuanced point -- that memory is constructed subconsciously.

So the insidious thing? Creating 100 videos with only slight political position adjustments, and thereby (even if the videos are later revealed as fakes!) shifting a voter's "gut" impression of a candidate.

I'd be amazed if we don't start seeing audio & video cryptographic authentication in the next 10 years. The subject of an interview gives me a box containing their private key, and video is looped through it and signed as we record.

[YaxelPerez]

I don't think cryptographic authentication will help very much.

It's probably safe to assume that most people susceptible to fake news are computer-illiterate. Or at least, not as technical as the HN crowd. Why would normal people suddenly start listening to some nerd mumbo-jumbo they don't understand?

[ethbro]

Technical knowledge doesn't seem requisite. Only independent verifiability.

In the same way that signing keys are used by infrastructure & many who don't understand the nuances.

[pnloyd]

Ya you could get an end result where your video player included in the videos infos "officially verified by persons x y & z"

[arbie]

What if X, Y, and Z are within your own filter bubble and want you to believe the fake news?

[gonehome]

I've been thinking about this and I think a tricky part is editing, since naturally people are going to want to edit the video for normal reasons but I think that will mess with the signature?

I guess you could always have the unedited version posted and verified, but that has its own difficulties too.

[SubiculumCode]

This is why a sort of chain of evidence would be required.

[pnloyd]

This has me thinking the cryptography of the future is going to get wildly complex.

[billylindeman]

I think audio/video authentication is gonna be huge also. One thought would be merkle proof of hashes of the keyframes and then a signature of the merkle root. drop that bad boy into an eos / eth contract.

[ethbro]

The trickier thing (as with most applied crypto) is going to be who attests and what to.

For press briefing, chaining to something like a White House press root is feasible.

But what about "married congressperson caught in local hotel with fling"? Or in one-party consent states, secret recordings? Self-sign? Sign with news organization (those that still exist) after sharing additional documentation?

[SubiculumCode]

I think it may be the true use case for crypto.

[ChainOfFools]

Sybil problem still remains. blockchain history can be rewritten relatively cheaply if defense is controlled by an army of nodes under obfuscated control of a single entity or clique. even worse when blind faith is put into authenticity of such information.

[Cyphase]

Crypto(graphy) already has plenty of use cases. I think you're probably referring to cryptocurrencies/blockchains.

[SubiculumCode]

Yes I was using that as shorthand, thanks for clarification.

[makomk]

This is probably already happening with good old fashioned Photoshop (or not even that sometimes). For instance, when a Telegraph journalist mistook a photoshopped photo of Trump with a white supremacist for the real deal and tweeted it with the comment that "this isn't complicated"[1], I doubt many people who saw the original tweet even saw the correction[2]. Over 28,000 retweets for the original claim, under a thousand for the correction. This is about typical.

[1] http://archive.is/paG5C [2] https://twitter.com/rafsanchez/status/896654656348323841

[_red]

As if "Photo OPs" haven't been essentially exploiting this principle for 100+ yrs.

This is nothing more than legacy media bemoaning that media production (and propaganda production) has now moved mainstream and is out of their control.

In the end its a good thing, having a "trusted news sources" is not a normative expectation to any critical thinking based society. Everything should be viewed critically and viewed somewhat suspiciously. The entire concept of "trusted news" only has real appeal to the intellectually lazy. There is no objective truth in matters of politics, economics, society. Having some class of companies designated as "Trusted" has 1000x scarier potential than "view everything as a potential political statement".

[rabidrat]

"A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."

[gowld]

One feature missing is a way to mark every account that tweeted the original but not the correction as an unreliable possible-troll.

[extralego]

This is not a prediction but I wonder if their proliferation could stretch the subconscious Overton Window. I think that’s where the Overton Window seems to operate.

[SubiculumCode]

This is exactly what is needed, and placed in phones at the chip level, ie photo authenticity certified by Samsung.

[ZeroBugBounce]

So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?

[Cyphase]

For those who aren't familiar with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

> The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox, is whatever prevents "dead matter" from giving rise, in time, to "expanding lasting life". The concept originates in Robin Hanson's argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies the possibility something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various scientific disciplines that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a "Great Filter" which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human). This probability threshold, which could lie behind us (in our past) or in front of us (in our future), might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction. The main counter-intuitive conclusion of this observation is that the easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.

So ZeroBugBounce is wondering if "not agreeing on facts/truth" is the thing (or one of the things) that technologically advanced civilizations experience that filters them out of the running for expanding out into space. E.g. people can't agree on facts, which causes unrest, riots, etc; civilization eventually collapses from it all, and people never make it into space.

[deltron3030]

In design and development, most processes are about sequences of diversion and conversion, and not being able to diverge, or only through violence, seems to be a major flaw of real political systems, there's a toxic fanatism about conversion and unity at all cost, which seems contrary to human evolution.

The last major diversion happened with the creation of the US, where a part that had different ideals split from its european core. the same thing happened throughout our history, starting in Africa from where people spread into the middle east and then beyond.

The options to handle this drive for diversion are either diversion into space, and/or inwards, reformation to gain time until we can spread into space.

Tech shouldn't be used to enforce conversion, but to enable peaceful diversion. Diversion, and diversion of opinion makes sense if there's a free flow of information. Political systems just haven't cought up.

[Felz]

Hm, I'd say not agreeing on facts/truth is more of a byproduct of not agreeing on what we want.

As a civilization, we still have the fatal problem that people want what's best for themselves, and we don't have great ways of making them work towards a common good. Worse still, as issues become more complex there are more ways to twist policy towards self-interest while maintaining a facade of group-interest. Evolution has beautifully primed us to do this subconsciously.

In this model, peoples' differing self interests leads to them constructing plausible but different arguments over "facts/truth". The conflict resolution mechanisms (argument) that used to work start breaking down. Society polarizes, stops agreeing on things, and eventually reverts to violence.

I don't think this is The Great Filter though. More likely our civilization disintegrates until it reaches a level of complexity we can handle again, but it's not going to be totally wiped out.

[Cyphase]

> I don't think this is The Great Filter though. More likely our civilization disintegrates until it reaches a level of complexity we can handle again, but it's not going to be totally wiped out.

I think people assume it often, but I don't think the Great Filter actually requires destruction of the species/civilization. Maybe it _is_ nukes, or bioweapons; or maybe, the Great Filter (or _a_ Great Filter) is #7 on Hanson's list[0], "Tool-using animals with big brains". So there could be plenty of species out there that use tools and even have civilization, but not enough or the right kind of brainpower for developing space travel. So the Great Filter could be a rigid wall that prevents further progress towards space travel, or an elastic trampoline that keeps pushing civilizations back whenever they get too close to it (what you said). Or it could be a wood chipper. We can only speculate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter

[note] I say "space travel", but this also includes remotely-detectable signs of intelligence (e.g. signals, or Dyson spheres), and if our remote sensing gets good enough, of life.

[nawgszy]

It seems to me it's the mere fact that humanity's rise was borne on the back of its ruthless drive and selfish greed, and the same things that made us the best hunters also influence society in myriad ways.

In my eyes, greed, hierarchy, and limited compassion / an inability to share are the filter, and all society's diseases are the symptoms.

[thaumaturgy]

I'm really disappointed when I hear this kind of thing. It's a sentiment that so many people believe, and want to believe, and choose to believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It's almost like a pernicious, psychological cancer, except it can also spread virulently to other susceptible hosts.

Humanity's rise is due to lots of factors, especially the countless individuals who have worked to improve the health, well-being, safety, and wealth of the people around them. Greed is but one aspect of humanity, and unbounded greed destroys societies.

Yeah, there are problems in 2018, but to sit here today, in the relative comfort of modern society, and say "we only have all this because we're terrible animals" is hugely disrespectful to the work of a lot of people.

[nawgszy]

I'm certainly not saying that we have no redeeming factors. As you say, that would be an absurd mindset in this world we live in.

However, I don't know how you can deny that we are greedy and have limited ability for compassion. Do you deny Dunbar's number? If not the specific selection, the concept?

Do you deny that some men have 10 figures of wealth while others have nothing to their name?

Do you deny that we have, as a society, enacted a plague upon the planet, and are causing extinction of other species at a rate only witnessed within other extinction events?

Just because one has virtue does not mean one doesn't have vice, and certainly the same applies to the "one" that is human society. While we certainly have accomplished great feats and have seen great individuals, as a collective, we do not know how to relinquish the individual pleasures in order to facilitate comfort and health for all.

As the article I saw here recently that said something along the lines of "people are not stupid; life is just hard", your energies are limited, and there are those who take advantage of the splintered and uncoordinated thoughts of society to gain great wealth and power, and those who use their great wealth and power to splinter and confuse the thoughts of society.

That is the cancer, not my thought that these people exist; do not ignore that their existence is all but guaranteed by the very nature of the creature we must have been to find ourselves the dominant force of this planet.

[ccvannorman]

Hear, hear.

Yes, you can look back at our animal past and at Chimpanzees and say we're a brutal, greedy, what-ever. But that is only a tiny sliver of conscious existence. What makes us human is the constant progression towards humanity - compassion, love, and society-wide safety and abundance.

See Hans Rosling for some promising trends rooted in global facts over the past 100 years. Yes, there are still bad things "left over" from being animals, but these are declining over the decades ::across the board::

[meowface]

You're right, but the problem is it it only takes a very small number of excessively greedy and power-hungry people to make the world worse for everyone.

[bpyne]

If you don't take into account cooperation, complex communication, and the ability to abstract (e.g. a rock isn't just something to step over, it's also a potential weapon and when many are combined a dwelling, bridge, etc.), then your observation has merit.

We're a relatively weak, slow animal. We don't see well at night. Our teeth and nails are fairly useless from a hunting or even defensive perspective. We don't procreate quickly and our young mature slowly. Our survival advantage is working in coordinated teams and having flexible minds with respect to the world around us. Cats are closer to what you described.

[shpx]

Lying is as old as language. Monkeys lie to each other[0]. Lying using video isn't going to be fundamentally new.

Our ancestors have solved this problem for millions of years through context, trust and reputation systems and a bunch of other heuristics. We're in a historically unusual time where we've developed a medium of communication that's cheap to use and very expensive to fake. It's only the transition period back that's ripe for exploitation.

Deepfakes aren't that easy to make and they only do one specific thing and do it quiet poorly if your job is to actually fool people. The handful that I've seen in the news are obviously fake. This is not the general purpose video faking tool I think we're really talking about.

"The Great Filter" and the probability of alien "civilizations" or life in general are massively overstated because of a bias for imagining cool stuff. Existential threats are real, no need to bring extraterrestrials into the discussion.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c7NEf6qFlc

[jerf]

"So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?"

It's a possibility I've considered before. To put some math meat on the idea, consider that as education increases, the number of thoughts you can conceivably think goes up exponentially, but your ability to discriminate probably goes up only polynomially, and possibly as badly as somewhere around linearly. So the smarter you get, the more bad and wrong idea come within your reach, and the less resources you have proportionally to disprove each one. And this is assuming a very idealized situation in which you are a perfectly rational observer attempting to dispassionately filter truth from untruth; any deviations from purely rational make it even worse. Note there's no reference to "humanity" in there; it's a problem everyone in this universe will have. (It's basically a restatement of the impossibility of Solomonoff induction.)

As an example of what I mean, consider the claim "the quadratic equation is x = (-b +/- Sqrt(b^2 - 4bc)) / 2a". My children are still too young to have any clue what that means. It requires substantial education to even begin to think this wrong thought, or any of the many related surrounding wrong thoughts; there's who knows how many ways I can mutate the right answer to be just slightly wrong, to say nothing of simply making something up. All of these wrong possibilities are available to you, once you are educated.

On the one hand, I use math here because it allows me to give you a clear example of an unambiguously wrong thought, on the other hand, it also betrays me for the very reason that it is unambiguously wrong. Math gives us tools to raise our confidence in the true quadratic equation even above the exponential noise of possible wrong answers. But the real world has much bigger problems than that where we lack such tools; how shall we structure our society to obtain a given goal? How shall we even determine what those goals are? How can we be sure that we are not actually putting ourselves on the path to inevitable destruction, even with possibly every participant trying to avoid that in all earnestness?

You probably just had some sort of thing leap into your head, perhaps about the environment or war or social inequality or something... how can you prove that you are not in fact 100% wrong? What if the only way we can still be alive in 10,000 years is precisely that we must unambiguously destroy our environment in order to be forced to learn to deal with it, because it's going to happen anyhow later (supervolcano, asteroid, etc.), so better to learn to deal with it in slow motion? What if space is empty because all the other species did learn to live in "harmony" with their environment, until it blew up and they couldn't deal with it? What if war is a necessary component of survival because without such evolutionary pressures, intelligent species inevitably just fade out of existence as intelligence is selected away, Idiocracy-style? What if the only way for anyone to survive the next 10,000 years is to create a rich upper class that at some point will be the only ones to survive some inflection point crisis? (What if the only way through the Singularity is for some rich person or set of people to be the one powerful enough to hold back the first rampaging AI, so all the egalitarian species keeled over dead because the AI trivially economically overpowered any given individual before extinguishing its own spark?) I'm not "seriously" proposing these ideas, but when it really gets down to it... you don't know. Neither do I.

[eli_gottlieb]

Not every fucking terrible thing is the Great Filter.

[JKCalhoun]

Deep fakes though make it much worse.

Before, only those inclined to believe a false narrative would allow themselves to be convinced by a selectively edited interview or whathaveyou.

From here out even the more discriminating of us are likely going to find ourselves being duped.

Who are still safe? The skeptics of course. Are we to be left as a society of skeptics though that doubt everything?

[GrumpyNl]

Uhh, isnt this what advertsing does?

[douglaswlance]

If only we had some kind of decentralized consensus system that could help us formulate truth on a societal scale...

[citrablue]

I sense you're being tongue-in-cheek, but how would something like blockchain help this situation? (I genuinely don't understand -- can you walk me through how that tech would validate a video's authenticity?)

Second, it would only help to validate that a video was taken (and possibly that it was not modified? But I suspect a great deal of video footage gets modified after capture, for light balancing and whatnot.)

Beyond that, however, the problem is larger: videos can be started after a person incites another. They can selectively film parts of an incident, so you miss details off-camera. They miss context, can push an agenda -- all of which are (IMO) the bigger problems than validating a video provenance. (Also, the latter would require skepticism of all non-blockchain'd videos -- something that would take a major cultural shift.)

[douglaswlance]

Decentralized reputation system that uses Proof of Stake to validate the "truthiness" of an individual. Users validate an idea/content by sharing some of their reputation to lend credibility to another.

[citrablue]

Isn't think what PageRank is? I have a website; by linking to you, I am vouching in a public space that I believe in your truthiness?

[douglaswlance]

Pages are not specific enough. We need RationalArgumentRank.

[elialbert]

this assumes a basic level of intelligence that I really doubt we as a species possess. Don't you think the majority of red or blue tribe e-warriors would happily stake any amount of reputation on something they agree with, regardless of authenticity?