We are not ready, yet!

“What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts? If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises — when you erode trust in institutions.”

People, especially politicians, have always been adept at spreading misinformation and letting the common masses fight over it, taking sides one way or the other. This problem has become exacerbated in recent times with the advent of AI.

Technology-induced misinformation is perhaps now the biggest threat to today’s democracies. Deep fake technology is as yet being used to create porn videos only — thankfully!

Imagine some inflammatory speech by a popular leader (actually created by AI technologies) for or against a specific community being spread like wildfire on WhatsApp, Telegram, or YouTube! This can be disastrous for elections and democracy will be dead if such a misuse happens. What happens to the rule of law? Are our courts equipped to handle such scenarios before they go out of hand?

The PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.

The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium. This is good, but only if the majority of the population adopts such an attitude. But as we all know, the majority is mostly dumb and take things at face value — meaning, blindly believing whatever they see or hear.

The speed at which technology-induced revolutions are reaching people is quite astonishing. Whether as a society, we will adopt it for our own good or our own destruction is in our hands. And that is a very scary prospect, given the current mankind’s collective consciousness!!