It is not a question of "if" but "when" AI voices will dominate public online spaces. There are many reasons for why AI will become the majority speaker in public spaces: monetization potential by operators, political motivations by corporate and state bodies, etc. And there is no question as to whether AI voices will be indistinguishable from human voices in the future : they already are.

In 10 years or even 5 years from now, I cannot imagine a situation where in any currently existing online space, it is possible to discern an actual human from an AI agent posing and operating as a human, for whatever motivations.

If this is a scenario that concerns you, there are two steps you can take now to "inoculate" yourself from the coming epidemic of AI, as it were:

1. Establish a cryptographic identity -- there will be a date in history, perhaps assigned arbitrarily, that will be called the date at which new "users" cannot be distinguished between AI and humanity. Creating a public and private key TODAY and distributing the public key around will serve as a proof of humanity pre-dating the AI takeover of the internet. One public key should be created for each online identity -- and despite our side of the internet's general tendency toward anonymity, a public key for a "real name" should definitely be created and published as well. When necessary, "online identities" can and should be cross-referenced against an operator's "real identity" -- given that all communication in a private-key public-key environs is encrypted, anyway, with "plausibly deniable" text, it should not be a concern what is addressed in a state of forward secrecy.

Purchasing cryptocurrency remains a viable means to "establish identity" as it

(a) requires a financial stake to occur, and (b) is linked with a cybernetic identity, with public + private keys, which give people a contact address and a means of private, personal communication.

2. Purchase a domain name that is obvious to the greater community in identifying you in some way, shape, or form: even if AI agents may dominate Twitter, Mastadon Network, et al, paying real money to a quasi-governmental agency is a measure of stability, if not a proof of identity. As with point 1, this should be done sooner, rather than later.

Even without encryption tools at his disposal, as long as someone is renewing a domain name, an objective log of ownership of the domain name continues: a sudden shift in domain name ownership should set off alarm bells in cautious watchers.

To conform with my principle of vaccination against AI-fication of the WWW, grab my public key for the email address 52 at 4x13.net here: https://4x13.net/me/key.txt

Reading philosophy is an activity that can benefit all people. I enjoy this pasttime so much that I spent many years in university developing my skill in it. Along the way, I learned a few things, not just about the world and the mind, but also how to learn.

Reading philosophy is important, not because it gives us values and truths to accept, but because it exposes us to the process of developing understanding. Difficult works that develop our abstract reasoning help us to understand complex issues that arise in the course of daily life - and can also help us explain our reasoning to others when facing complex issues.

It is unfortunately necessary to be somewhat well-read in philosophy to keep up in more formal philosophical discourse. What follows is my attempt to collect noteworthy classical, modern, and contempotary works on a number of topics, with special focuses on the nature of mind, reality, the limits of knowledge, & moral teachings in a roughly chronological order. When reading philosophy like this, you can follow chains of thought through the centuries. After reading the texts I suggest, you should be able to begin participating in more serious philosophical discussion - not to mention developing more nuanced positions - and it shouldn't be hard to find people or resources to help understand the texts along the way.

After my list of suggested texts, more general notes on actually reading philosopy follow.

Continue reading...