Fake News is a hot topic recently (the past five or so years?). Other terms I would use include misinformation and propaganda.
This stuff has been around ever since we’ve had our earliest version of mass media – the printing press. Back in 1835, in a New York newspaper called The Sun, they published a huge hoax about discovering alien wildlife on the mood. It’s referred to as the Great Moon Hoax in a contemporary setting. But, at the time people didn’t know that it was a hoax and genuinely believed that life has been discovered on the moon. Some writer just though, “I bet I can tell these people that there’s a civilization of bat-human hybrids living on the moon and they’d believe me!” And, believe him they did.
Similar thing also happened in 1938, although this time accidentally and via the power of radio. The CBS radio network began broadcasting a radio drama based on H.G. Well’s novel War of the Worlds, which features a martian invasion of earth. The show was structured like a real radio broadcast, but the broadcasters would mention odd things like flashing lights sighted on Mars or strange metal cylindrical objects falling from the sky. Eventually, the broadcast turned into a reporting of a hypothetical martian invasion of earth.
It was stated in the beginning of the broadcast that the following is a work of fiction. But, not everyone got the message and this resulted in a panic. The radio station was stormed by policemen and the broadcasters were ordered to notify all listeners again that the show was a production. Despite best efforts there was a nationwide panic over people fearing that a real martian invasion was happening.
I myself fall victim to this type of misinformation. My previous post was about the representation of Islamic freedom fighters in American media. I wrote that entire post with a certain part of Rambo 3 in mind – the ending credits. The ending credits that originally said “This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan.” but, was allegedly later change to, “This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan.”
Those two endings were the perfect representation of changing attitudes in American culture towards Islamic freedom fighters. But, after writing my entry, I did research on this and it turns out that, despite the internet all claiming this to be true, I could not find any evidence that the original film contained the dedication to the Mujaheddin. I fell for the FAKE NEWS. (and, was forced to cut and severely edit my last entry.)
There’s website called This Person Does Not Exist which will generate a computer generated image of a person every time you refresh. There is a game called AI Dungeon which will generate a random text adventure for your based on your inputs. We have deepfake images and video and voices. We have botnets that control millions of social media accounts that all talk and advertise to each other.
What happens when this technology becomes more sophisticated and readily available? How is your average person supposed to be able to defend themselves against this? Well, they can’t, and we’re all doomed.
Fermi’s Paradox basically states that the Universe is vast and old, and so we should have been visited by aliens by this point, but we haven’t met any other intelligent lifeforms, why is this? There are many answers to this question – one hypothetical answer is that the nature of intelligent life is to destroy itself. And, it’s easy to imagine – a nuclear war, a bio-weapon let lose, man-caused climate change or some rogue A.I. killing us all.
But, I don’t think we should discount the possibility that what will kill us all is mass misinformation. Lies created so quickly and cleverly that nobody can determine what is or what isn’t true anymore. No intelligent entity can exist if it cannot make any type of statement, or declare any type of fact about reality, that is true.
Miscommunicating Communication 