{"id":4369,"date":"2020-09-25T14:51:58","date_gmt":"2020-09-25T18:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=4369"},"modified":"2020-10-12T17:32:37","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T21:32:37","slug":"forging-social-proof-networked-turing-test-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2020\/09\/25\/forging-social-proof-networked-turing-test-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Forging Social Proof: the Networked Turing Test Rules the First AI War"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago I wrote about how our civilization was forfeiting the zeroth AI war<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 allowing individual attention hacks, deployed at scale, to diminish and replace our natural innovation and productivity in every society.\u00a0 We gained efficiency in every area of life, and then let our new wealth and spare time get absorbed by newly-efficient addictive spirals.<\/span><\/p>\n

Exploit culture<\/h3>\n

This war for attention affects what sort of society we can hope to live in. Channeling so much wealth to attention-hackers, and the networks of crude AI tools and gambling analogs that support them, has strengthened an entire industry of exploiters, allowing a subculture of engineers and dealmakers to flourish.\u00a0 That industry touches on fraud, propaganda, manipulation of elections and regulation, and more, all of which influence what social equilibria are stable.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first real AI war<\/h3>\n

Now we are facing the first <\/span>real<\/span><\/i> artificial-intelligence war \u2014 dominated by entities that appear as avatars of independent, intelligent people, but are artificial, scripted, automated.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What is new in this? Earlier low-tech versions of this required no machine learning or programming: they used the veil of pseudonymity to fake authorship, votes, and small-scale consensus.\u00a0 In response, we developed layers of law and regulation around earlier attacks \u2014 fraud, impersonation, and scams are illegal.\u00a0 AI can smoothly scale this to\u00a0<\/span>millions of comments<\/span><\/a> on public bills, and to forging microtargeted social proof in millions of smaller group interactions online. And these scaled attacks are often still legal, or lightly penalized and enforced.<\/span>
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Scale and speed<\/h3>\n

Fabricating an alternate fantastical<\/a> reality, exaggerated and unfalsifiable, is a common tactic in socializing broad reallocations of agency and power. {cn}<\/em>\u00a0 This\u00a0realfabrik<\/i> often cannibalizes the knowledge, cooperation, and stability of its surrounding society, in order to build something incompatible with it.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0was once limited by the human <\/span>capacity\u00a0and commitment of one’s followers. Now, however, you can build such a movement in your (or someone else’s) backyard.\u00a0 This is thanks to a confluence of developments in spam, propaganda, AI, and delegated decision-making, including:<\/span><\/p>\n