Ask HN: What tech utopia/horror ideas do you see materialising soon?

AR will marginally improve the life of anyone who uses it and worsen the life of everyone around them, including people who themselves use AR, especially as the usage rate rises.

• Right now it is possible to opt out of location tracking in cities by simply leaving your phone at home or turning it off temporarily. If 10% of people start using AR, that will no longer be possible due to facial recognition.

• Right now, you can mostly tell when someone is recording you in such a way that the video could be used against your interests (aiming a personal cell phone at you or, if and only if you intend to commit a crime, stores' security cameras (which don't record audio)). Also, right now, when you make a small mistake, you can presume that you were not recorded because people will not have had time to get their phone out and start recording. You apologize and life goes on. With 10% of people using AR, you must presume to be recorded at all times by people who can and will upload the video for everyone to see in exchange for minuscule social media engagement.

• Right now, it is already relatively socially unacceptable to tell a friend or peer to stop using their phone in a social environment, like during dinner. I have experienced that it's a sure-fire way to ruin a dinner date. They'll comply and silently resent you. I see no reason why it would be different with ubiquitous AR. This will cause problems and I have a feeling that society's eventual solution will tend toward "let people do what they individually want" rather than the "we agree to stop using AR during this event".

• The number of people who cannot live without AR is going to be shockingly high. It will not be possible to get to know young people as people because their thinking process and personality will be so intertwined with AR that they shut down without it. Tim Cook: "So I think that if you, and this will happen clearly not too long from now, if you look back at a point in time, you know, zoom out to the future and look back, you'll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality. Just like today, we wonder, how did people like me grow up without the internet. And so I think it could be that profound, and it's not going to be profound overnight".

The bulk of people are utterly gullible. You don't have to look past any of the creative writing exercises on r/tifu that make the front page of reddit.

The major application of AI/deepfakes/etc is going to be to continue to bombard the internet with fake information, driving a wedge between people and reality.

The result is going to be more conspiracy theories going mainstream, more people believing "counterintuitive" things about how human systems work, etc.

I don't see us generating an immune-system-like response to this anytime soon, and suspect it will require some kind of massive WWII-scale tragedy before policymakers stop treating it as a game and taking it seriously.

This won't be done by "terrorists", it will be done in bulk by nation-state actors and billionaires and their proxies.

Right now we can still identify the obvious bot accounts on twitter, reddit, etc. In the future, ChatGPT-like accounts will be running continuously building up accounts with months of history on random subjects (although consistent subjects per account) before they are employed to reinforce some narrative. They'll even get properly offended and flip you shit when you accuse them of being bots.

The only way out of it may be certifying identity through the government who is real and mandating that people use their real identities on social media and requiring social media to collect proof of who their users are. Which is its own dystopia.