Epistemics vs Video Generation
Veo 3 released yesterday serves as another example of what’s surely coming in terms of being able to generate video that’s indistinguishable from reality. We will be coming off a many-decades period where we could just believe video as a source of truth: what a luxury that will have been, in hindsight!
Assuming it’s important to have sources of truth, I see the following options going forward:
we will have to just accept that our world has permanently become epistemically worse. sad!
we will have to trust real life more than we do external evidence. this seems very limiting: my real life friends don’t have much insight into what’s happening in Ukraine, for example
we will need to pair video with a sort of “chain of custody” whereby the video itself will not be worth anything (epistemically) unless it comes with someone, whose identity is established in some other way, vouching for it being true. this is, in a way, how we presently treat written evidence.
lacking a trusted source, but making up for it by combining multiple videos of the same thing. imagine multiple angles of the same event (as confirmed by hard-to-spoof video metadata) corroborating each other (perhaps this can even be AI-enabled, in a privacy-preserving way). hoping that this is easy to verify but hard to fake (hard to generate mutually consistent multiple angles of the same thing) though this might be wishful thinking since this seems like something that can be trained eventually, but maybe buys us a few years
the physics solution: from first principles, video had the property that it was much easier to verify than it was to fake (a la certain encryption). video is, reductively, just a time series of photons. perhaps we can build The Truth Camera, which captures lots of other particles (or maybe captures photons at a frame rate and resolution that is costly, and thus there isn’t much data of, and thus is hard to credibly fake). essentially perhaps we can snapshot more aspects of reality in such a way that we re-create the condition that made video credible: easy to verify, hard to generate.
nb: There will likely be a long period where video is fake but still believed, much like people still believe things that are written down over things that are spoken, despite the fact that anyone can freely write down anything at any point.
I wonder if the attractor state of powerful beings is a bipole consisting of:
a. wireheading / reward hacking, facing one’s inner world
b. defense, facing one’s outer world
As we’ve gotten more and more control over our environment, much of what we humans seem to want to do resembles reward hacking: video games, sex-not-for-procreation, solving captivating math problems, etc. In an ideal world, we might just look to do that all day long, in particular if we could figure out how to zap our brains into making every time feel like the first time.
However, if you spend all day wireheading and your neighbor doesn’t, your neighbor will outpace you in resource generation and may be able to, one way or another, melt you down for scrap (and repurpose your resources for their own wireheading, possibly).
Much human culture (e.g. social customs, religion) can be understood as an attempt to temper some of the wireheading in favor of more defense, i.e. it’s discouraged as immoral to over-indulge yourself on video games, you should be out working hard instead.
Perhaps this, or something akin to it, could be expected to hold for the behavior of advanced AI systems. The end state of superintelligences may be perfect wireheading hidden behind the impenetrable event horizon of a black hole so that nobody can disturb its reverie.[1]
Of course, it would be bad news if the epitome of defense is wiping out anything else that may surprise it, a la the List of Lethalities.