When seeing isn’t believing, truth needs infrastructure. Verification—not perception—becomes the foundation for reality in a world of flawless synthetic media.
When seeing is no longer believing, the infrastructure of truth becomes the most important infrastructure we have
By Futurist Thomas Frey | ImpactLab.com
In 1964, the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously declined to define obscenity and instead wrote that he knew it when he saw it. For most of human history, that same standard applied to reality itself. You knew what was real when you saw it. The evidence of your own eyes was, if not infallible, at least the most reliable instrument available.
That era is ending. It may already be over.
The synthetic media tools now available to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can place any person’s face on any body, put any words in any mouth, and fabricate any event with a fidelity that is, under normal viewing conditions, indistinguishable from authentic footage. The question is no longer whether a determined adversary can create convincing false video of a public figure, a crime scene, a military incident, or a medical emergency. They can. The question is whether any infrastructure exists to verify that what you are seeing is what actually happened.
Right now, that infrastructure does not exist at scale. The Veritas Node is a proposal for what it would look like if it did.
Continue reading… “The Veritas Node”