Doomsday Clock

[SimpleCaveman]

Hey All,

Hope you’re having a good day. I read this article this morning and found it worthy of discussion.

It comes from a Catholic newsletter with very high quality journalism. I have included it here entirely so that you don’t have to go to the site and accidently get triggered.

I have hidden the article, for those who wouldn’t be able to read it in a way that gets them past the blinding rage. For those who can, I’d be interested in your thoughts.

---

Happy Friday friends,

I’m feeling pretty much like the world could end at any time. That might seem a little bit dramatic, I’ll concede that up front.

And where I’m going with this is going to strike some of you as silly and overwrought.

But I’m mostly serious. Just hear me out.

I started the week ranting to the Mrs. about this shiny new breed of AI software that allowed a speech at Davos, delivered in Spanish by the Argentine president, to be seamlessly and simultaneously rendered into English, in his own voice and accent, with his mouth augmented to fluently fit the translation.

Argentine president Javier Milei, sans chainsaw.

If we can do this, I said, we can never know what’s real again unless we see it with our own eyes.
Right on queue, a story out of New Hampshire detailed how an AI prank call had gone out on polling day, with the voice of Joe Biden telling voters that it was all a bunch of malarkey and they should stay home.

Harmless enough in the grand scheme of things, but I think this is just the beginning.

Imagine that shortly after Election Day in November the result is in dispute, subject to recounts and court cases.

Now imagine a fake “leaked” video emerges, appearing to show Donald Trump saying he wants his supporters to march on Washington to storm the Supreme Court, or seize the White House. Or one appearing to show Kamala Harris discussing Biden’s mental state and her intention to invoke the 25th Amendment in the first weeks of a new term.

How many minutes on TikTok would it take for any of that to go viral, and at what consequence?
Would any denial or any debunking be enough to convince even half the country that something like that was fake — and which half? What are the odds it would occasion an actual riot, and then counterriots?

Let’s dial the stakes up higher.

Let’s say the deepfake is of the Ukrainian president saying something truly outrageous, like his special forces are smuggling a suitcase nuke into Moscow — what do you suppose the Russians would justify doing with that? And what response could or would the West deploy?

The people who do the Doomsday Clock [url= https://substack.com/redirect/66e96e8a-6...H7fAP0]set the time at 90 seconds to annihilation this week.[/url] It’s an alarmist PR stunt, to be sure. But even a fake clock can tell the right time once in a while.

I don’t have a plan to mitigate any of this, by the way. But neither does anyone else — and there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency around it either. That’s what I find really frightening.

---

The article ends with an apology and a link. I posted that part of it in the Humor section. I’m still laughing.