Is Our Future an Analogue 2.0 World?

Will AI decide the US next president? That's the title of an episode of BBC's Enquiry podcast, only one of the many, many media bits about the issue.
But the US presidential election, as important as it might be, is but a single example of how our lives will be changed by new technology.

Think about it. We all know someone who constantly boasts about things they didn't do, or always promises stuff they’ll never be doing. Sure, some things this person tells us are true, but after we realize that many aren’t, we just stop believing them. In Spanish there’s a saying that goes “Build yourself a reputation and get to sleep”. It means that reputations maintain themselves with very little work once they exist, be it positive or negative.

But back to AI and how our lives will be changed by it. Up until now we didn't need to be physically present to experience something happening far away, we had images, video and audio of those events that proved they really happened. An image is stronger than a thousand words, right? Radio, TV, newspapers and magazines have been in our lives forever.

Well, now AI allows anybody to create whatever image, video or audio we please.

AI-generated images of US President Biden and Vice President Harris celebrating Former President Trump's indictment.

So the main issue, at least for me, is: "how much information do I receive from digital sources, and how much do I receive from analogue sources?".

Until now the need for differentiating between the two sources didn’t exist, we knew that technology didn't allow for any of it to be transformed in such a way to be credible. That has changed, profoundly, an now thinking what will happen when we can't believe anything we digitally see or hear will be well worth our time and effort.

I know my neighbours are on holiday because I don't hear them walking down the stairs in the morning to go to work. I know the waitress at my local coffee shop is getting married because she told me so, in person. That is the kind of information I get the "analogue" way. Information I saw and heard and touched and smelled and tasted on my own.

All the rest is "digital" information. TV, radio, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tick-tock, Discord, WhatsApp, Line... THE WHOLE INTERNET.
All that can, and will, be tampered with.
This very writing that, in this case, was written by me, a human being... but how can you be sure?

From now on, the whole bulk of information we are exposed to, which is online information, will need to be questioned. The only information we will be able to fully trust is the one we physically perceive with our five senses, with our flesh-and-bone body. And if everything we watch and listen to online can be fake, and if we have no real way of discerning what is fake and what isn't, will we react the same way as with the human liar above?

Will we instinctively go back to reality in the year 1990 when the internet wasn't a thing, and re-build an analogue world in which we can live a human-sized existence? Will we end up using the internet exclusively as a mere source of entertainment?

Maybe it won't be too bad to dedicate a little less time to the digital world, and a little more to life around us?

Many people weren’t even alive before the internet, it might be impossible for them to imagine that kind of world. But many people did experience a purely analogue life. it wasn't too long ago that we lived this way, it was perfectly normal.

I don't think we necessarily need to be scared about going towards a 2.0 version of that life. We just need to get used to it.

It can be done, in fact, humans have lived in an analogue world for most of their history, and many people are already reducing online time by choice, and getting rid of devices that, let’s be honest, take up a large chunk of our lives in detriment of the quality of relationships with the people who are, physically, around us.

Of course there’s no way of going back to a pre-internet world, the world wide web is here to stay. But the internet is a tool, and as every took we can choose how to use it. Maybe the rise of AI will force us to go towards a more human-scale society in which even digital connections can be on a personal scale, like when I talk to my mother in another country on WhatsApp. That wouldn't be too bad, would it?

Or maybe there will be an AI escalation where we would need to filter each bit of online information to AI filters to make sure it's not something created by... AI... 😅

This new technology opens a whole world of possibilities, but as with everything else, there will be drawbacks too.
Never being able to believe digital information is definitely one of them. What you do from here is up to you.

Laura