“In a recent video, Bill Gates called “misinformation” the #1 unsolvable problem facing today’s young people. A week later Taylor Swift, in her Harris endorsement post, referred to her “fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation”. I asked Gemini (Ai) to review all of Taylor Swift’s and Bill Gates’ recorded uses of the word misinformation and generate a definition they would both agree with:
“false or misleading information spread, often intentionally, to deceive or manipulate people”
In their words:
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Taylor Swift –“Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy.” “Misinformation can have serious consequences, eroding trust in institutions, fueling conflict, and undermining public health efforts.” – Bill Gates Taylor Swift – “One of the biggest challenges of our time is to make sure the majority of people still feel there are sources of information they can trust.” “The digital age has made it easier than ever to spread falsehoods and conspiracy theories.” – “We need to combat the spread of misinformation through a combination of critical thinking, media literacy, and technological solutions.” – Bill Gates |
In the video Gates said that he hadn’t imagined that the digital age would to lead to such powerful ways of exploiting people because he assumed “people would want correct information” (wow). Ironically, it was his daughter’s experience of harassment (something I can relate to) that woke him to the dangers of misinformation (I wonder if his daughter was influenced by Swift’s messaging?)
Realizing today’s level of misinformation is already doing grand scale harm, Gates, Swift, Beyonce, and many other luminaries, are fearful about the even greater threat of Ai optimized (weaponized) misinformation.
“We have access to so much information – some facts, and some complete bullshit disguised as truth…Just recently, I heard an AI song that sounded so much like me it scared me. It’s impossible to truly know what’s real and what’s not.” Beyonce GQ interview
Gates calls the problem “unsolvable” because it’s already pandemic in scale and beyond our ability to technologically or legislatively contain. Future generations, unless they learn otherwise, are going to live in a world where pandemic misinformation is constantly sucking their attention and vitality.
With respect, I think “misinformation” is the wrong rabbit hole to lead us down. It’s great that these mega influencers are trying to help society wake up to how society-altering the misinformation crisis is becoming. But misinformation is the currency not the cause of the harm it does.
The problem with focusing on misinformation is that the root of the misinformation problem is neither its component contents (words, images, sounds,) or its information-tech / media. Misinformation (in the sense we mean it here, not the innocent error) is predatorily intended information. It’s its predatory intention, more than anything else, that differentiates information from misinformation. Misinformation is information intentionally constructed and spread to manipulate people. Every piece of misinformation is a kind of info-ammo a -“device”- created to benefit its owners by manipulating people’s mental, emotional and/or worldly behaviors (as if the owners have every right to intentionally, tactically, intelligently, and mostly covertly, enslave the behaviors of others to serve their purposes).
Every piece of misinformation is a predatory behavior-manipulation device.
What makes, perhaps, misinformation such an unsolvable problem, is the fact that “using information to predatorily manipulate behavior” is both constitutionally protected and commonly accepted. It’s perfectly legal and comfortably ethical for people and organizations to use misinformation to manipulate and suck value from people.
Mining the Minding
Today we are constantly bombarded by predatory behavior manipulation devices. Only a small fraction of the many thousands of ads we are hit with each day are ethically informational. The vast majority (80-90%) are tactically designed to manipulate people’s economic and political (money and/or voting) behaviors. Ninety percent of the ads you’ve experienced today are exhibits of misinformation. And that’s what makes the misinformation problem seem so “unsolvable”; our capitalism and politics are based on and depend upon on continually using misinformation.
The root of the abuse of slavery wasn’t caused by the chains, branding irons, collars or whips. It was the right to enslave – to own people – that enabled the abuses. Similarly the problem of misinformation is not the information content or technology, it’s the still accepted right to manipulate and enslave people’s behaviors (the right to treat people as useable assets that can be manipulated to your advantage).
What both Taylor Swift, Bill Gates and more and more people seem rightfully worried about is what happens when the right to use information to enslave / manipulate human behavior becomes baked into the ethics of AI? What happens when the most powerful technology ever developed by humans is used to manipulate humans to the benefit of its owners? Where will that lead us?
The most powerful forces in our economy and politics depend on manipulating the behaviors of our population in ways fundamentally unhealthy to our population’s learning. Misinformation is just the strings of their puppetting.
So long as we play whack a mole with the specific content and machinery of misinformation we will miss focusing on the deeper issue that spawned and maintains misinformation in the first place. Slavery wasn’t abolished by taking away the tools of slavery but by asserting and legally establishing our collective forbiddance of slavery. We said no more to slavery.
If we want to stop the society sucking effects of misinformation we will have to become a society willing to collectively forbid the predatory manipulation of behavior. If we fail to do so, if we accept this form of predation as something we are powerless to change (like we once did with slavery) then Gates is right, the misinformation problem is unsolvable.
Misinformation is Predatory
So long as the predatory manipulation of human behavior is legally, ethically, and commonly accepted as a fundamental right of capitalism (like slavery once was), the most powerful forces in our economy and politics will continue to work against the health of our population’s learning and therefore the future of us all.