Information Pandemics

Society has become a drug addict trapped in its own hallucinations, which are essential in order to survive this dystopia. We have built a civilisation and self-affirming #psychonomy which do everything in their power to maintain our delusion that this party will go on forever.  The media machine of the farm, which is about to be outsourced to the Thing through AI-generated news content, has already become almost fully automated and intelligent. AI trolls funded by the business interests of the Thing are already skewing and distorting any meaningful online conversation through engineered news, polarization, deep fakes, microtargetting and “shitposting”. This is not simply a threat to democracy. It is a threat to reality.

This clever game is increasingly falling out of human control. The creation and dissemination of toxic fake news is an artform which we engineered, nurtured and experimented with for hundreds of years. Now everything that we have learned about human manipulation is being imbued into next generation marketing algorithms. Manual marketing and propaganda are dead. They are a harmless, benign version in comparison to what is coming. As political marketing fully interfaces with the technology which has been at the forefront of #consumatron advertising for decades, it rapidly gives way to a new marketing brain which can guess which party we affiliate with, based on which shoes we bought. It knows each and every one of us better than we know ourselves, from just a few pieces of our digital footprint.

This is not simply marketing on steroids. This is not religion. This is an algorithm which has the power to convert even the smartest human into a member of the most bizarre cult, if it wants to. It is a deep fake algorithm which will soon be able to video call you, impersonate your mom, and ask you for ransom. The barrier between what is real and what is not, is about to become ever more hazy and catastrophically precarious.

We are in the process of creating an autonomous, living being, a bug which can increasingly think and replicate on its own. We are unleashing this bug on an already scared (and scarred) population, leaving it to decide which type of information pandemic it wants to spread, where, coinciding with which climate crisis catastrophe, right when people are at their most vulnerable – and gullible. As these algorithms become increasingly intelligent, able to reverse-engineer an entire propaganda based on the desired result (or government), the million-dollar question is: who is more dangerous: the algorithms as they eventually become autonomous, or the humans themselves, who are still largely in charge of developing and guiding these algorithms?

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books