An intersting thought experiment. If we go back 100 years ago in many towns throughout the US I could've started a newspaper and published anything about the world or world politics that I wanted to. I could publish in my newspaper that credible sources said the Kaiser was going to invade Japan, I could've published about how a new miracle cure of an imaginary plant in India would cure bunions, or pretty much whatever I wanted as long as it wasn't easy to verify, and this worked because there wasn't an easy way for people in more isolated farming communities to really check or corroborate what was going on, this was in large part because it didn't have an effect on their world at all.
Now 100 years later i can do the same thing and realistically it is just as hard to actually verify or validate with the amount of misleading, partial, censored, or manipulated information out there. How much difference will this make on my life personally though?
Here's the thing society isn't static or changing we've seen recently several events that has destroyed many peoples trust in various sources of infomration, my guess is with another generation coming up in a world where it is widely acknowledged that most sources of information are biased or fabricated they will grow up with an "immunity" so to speak from this misinformation and grow to disregard everything they find and read online, just like they did before.
Its not a thought experiment.
The 30 years war was fought over the printing press at its core. Newspapers are nothing compared to the bible in terms of misinformation risk, harmful cults regularly spring up to this day by astray pastors making their own version of the Bible to proclaim themselves as some prophet.
So naturally, the Catholic church at the time was extremely concerned with people being able to 'translate' the bible (any translations will inevitably deviate from the official latin codex to an extent), that's how the protestant catholic conflict began, as the war to control the source of truth.
And 1/3rd of Germany's population died because of this war.
That being said, its absolutely worth it in the end. The Muslim world chose to not have this conflict, and banned the printing press (So the Quran can't be printed or translated). What ended up happening there is 500 years of utter stagnation with no new technological or social leaps.
Generative AI will definitely cause conflicts that indirectly kill millions. But that's just the price of adaptation, I was shocked at how people didn't seem to care about the COVID deaths after a while, I guess that's a good thing in the end.
Now 100 years later i can do the same thing and realistically it is just as hard to actually verify or validate with the amount of misleading, partial, censored, or manipulated information out there. How much difference will this make on my life personally though?
Here's the thing society isn't static or changing we've seen recently several events that has destroyed many peoples trust in various sources of infomration, my guess is with another generation coming up in a world where it is widely acknowledged that most sources of information are biased or fabricated they will grow up with an "immunity" so to speak from this misinformation and grow to disregard everything they find and read online, just like they did before.