It feels like a dark storm moving in because more and more what I see on the internet I have to question as believable. Perhaps it was the casual, no consequence, lies we had to worry about in the last election, but if it wasn’t bad enough to hear misinformation with our ears, it is our eyes and ears we will have to question in the next election cycles. To the degree the internet economy is more than a massive convenience store for anything from coffee filters to house size television screens, as a news outlet, social media services, and essential branch of banking services, human services etc. We are reaching a point of break down. Lies have acquired a third dimension made possible by AI.  Any greedy fool now has access to an unearned massive amoral intelligence that can engineer near perfect sensory deceptions and fraud upon demand for little to no cost (if you figure the environmental destruction from AI generation no cost). Every communication linked to commerce is becoming suspicious or at least should be suspicious and we are only warming up the possibilities  In the future we will have to rely on the integrity, security and honesty of the internet administration   For now, suffice to say, we cannot.i

For this writer January 6 and how that played out spelled the end of an epoch that depended on an unspoken baseline of trust in open public commerce.  We initially gave the ‘secure internet’ that trust. On that fateful day of January 6 we, as a nation, eye witnessed and heard the attack on our nation’s Capital.  AI was only marginally available on that January 6, but the assault on the Capital Police, deaths, destruction and general range of obscenities at that time were beyond the scale capabilities of AI to engineer as some suggest.  Almost all of us were eye witnesses to the crime. Yet, today, the new emerging art of 3d Revisionist history, that wicked offspring of AI,  has wiped that event and its consequences from the “reality” of more than half the voters in this country.  We now live and decide as if it didn’t really happen.  The perpetrators have been released despite their crimes and more than half the nation no longer believe what their eyes beheld and our courts confirmed. That crazy genius of AI has taught us how to deceive ourselves.  This could only happen through the internet.  We are technologically delusional as a majority political society. And we are only just beginning.

An Urgent Proposal for Good

The First Two (of seven) Virtues of The Next Democracy

1. Speaking Truth;
2. Building Toward the ‘Shared Public Reality’ and unity;

A democracy cannot survive a population of citizens not devoted to the truth and indifferent to unity. We live in an age so divided and frustrated by the harder truths that we have created devices to deceive ourselves and they are working. The Next Democracy must recommit to the truth, hard or not. The adult’s political lie should be a game stopper if not ender.  No longer can we tolerate the political lie as the clever stepchild of the spin doctor.  Freedom of speech cannot include the egregious lies we now tolerate. We must remain free to speak all truths, but there cannot be such a thing as freedom to lie.  As for the internet, if it doesn’t grow a minimalist conscience it will self-destruct very quickly in the time of AI and its brilliant manipulations of reality.  Lets all grow up, put on the big adult’s pants.  We must once again seek and speak truth and build toward a shared reality impossibly difficult as that seems. That would be good.

To read more about the The Next Democracy in the 21’st century click:  https://thegooddecision.org/your-sense-of-democracy/