In a world where liquid content is becoming a reality...
... what was fixed and final no longer is.
where do we stand?
fakING democracy
authorship, ownership, authenticity and creativity are no longer easily identifiable, attributable and filterable.
the power of tech platforms can descend entire democracies into chaos.
In a project for the Home Office in the UK we worked with a cross section of government departments, security agencies, science labs to explore the scenarios around deep fakes.
The below video is a deep fake of HACKMASTERS founder Saher Sdihom introducing the topic to an assembled cross section of government officials and law enforcement officers. While the image is true none of the text, accent nor sound is real.
From de-railing elections, to manipulation of real people's identities to using and influencing collective opinions against minorities.
All very real, very present dangers.
In our scenario development beyond the project we built speculative worlds where extreme dystopic futures could effectively create a fork in human evolution.
On one end we called it Idocracy. Here we could end up externalising most of our critical faculties to an external mind. Effectively we become dumber as the ai becomes smarter resulting in loss of human agency over it's own progress.
On the other end we end up in a Mindopoly. Here we evolve into a hybrid mind with ‘super intelligence' that has moved from being projected into our retinas via Meta Raybanesque glasses to implantable brain chips.
In the later scenario we are at the heart of transhumanism where we are making an evolutionary leap that is no longer just biological but a hybrid from of futuristic neo-neaderthals that have AI attachments.
Regardless of these two extreme scenarios it is sad that in the future looking back at today we will probably call our times the good times.
Because we had the luxury of trying to identify and label deep fakes. In the future we might have nothing to compare it to as everything becomes a liquid soup of ai generated stuff.
