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AFAICT, as bad as it is already, this is only going to get worse as (1) NLP AI gets better and (2) there remains no positive defense against sybil attacks.I strongly agree. The future of public discourse online looks dim. At that point, on one hand, platforms will certainly require more Personal Identifiable Information, which harms the privacy of regular users. Meanwhile, trolls and bots from various malicious actors will be able to dominate and control many conversations on an unprecedented scale. One would have neither privacy nor security, the web envisioned by digital utopianists as a free, open platform will be completely dead.
100 years ago, the pioneers of aviation believed the invention of airplanes would be a force to end all wars, because it breaks the power asymmetry in battlefields. But we get massive aerial bombardments on civilians instead.
> It was an idea shared by many after the inception of flight. War would become practically impossible, the brothers thought, because the scouting done by aircraft would equalize opposing nations with information on each other's movements, preventing surprise attacks.
> "We thought governments would recognize the impossibility of winning by surprise attacks," Orville said in 1917, "and that no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out its enemy."
> Two years before, he had declared: "The aeroplane will prevent war by making it too expensive, too slow, too difficult, too long drawn out."
> "Yes, we thought it might have military use - but in reverse," said the 76-year-old inventor, whose brother had died at age 45 in 1912. "Because the men who start wars aren't the ones who do the fighting, we hoped that the possibility of dropping bombs on capital cities would deter them."
100 years later, the pioneers of the web believed the invention of the Web would be the force to a free society because it breaks the power asymmetry on information between individuals and the state. But we are now getting massive manipulations from all types of malicious actors.
> "Information," Gage [John Gage from Sun Microsystems] answers, matter-of-factly. "What stopped the Vietnam War was that we told the truth about what was happening. Today, the truth-telling mechanisms that we can put in people's hands are a million times more powerful," he says, wending through the ghetto fringe of East Palo Alto. "And when every person on the planet has access to that power - which is what I'm trying to do - then watch what happens."
Yes, many people now has access to that power, but some, like state actors (or just plain old advertisers), now have order-of-magnitude more power.