Jeff Hancock: The future of lyingThis TED talk is a great insight into the future of lying and how the way communication has changed has changed the way that we deceive one another and how often we choose to do so. Jeff Hancock, the presenter, talks about new forms of deception that have come about because the medians we use in order to communicate.
One of the really worrying deceptions to me is the Chinese Water Army (CWA)/Astro-turfing (AT), which refers to the situation where hundreds/thousands of people are hired to create content/reviews to promote an idea. Common examples are: reviews of hotels and books, profiles on dating websites, content within a community. With the internet becoming an unavoidable part of our modern daily lives it is worrying that decisions that we make could be affected by CWA/AT. With companies and individuals diluting genuine information in order to improve reputation and ultimately increase the probability of revenue, I feel it is of the utmost importance that we take measures to protect ourselves from this fictitious content.
Various websites attempt to protect from this by detecting deception and removing such content. By using various machine learning techniques computer scientists are able to, with a certain error margin, identify this content. Jeff Hancock briefly touches upon this in his talk. However, what is very interesting that finishes his talk upon is the consideration, in my understanding, is that if every interaction that we make on-line is traceable back to us (our on-line identity) then we are able to create a place where people will always have to consider whether or not to lie/deceive as it will be part of our legacy.
If you are interested in this talk you should give it a watch and write your feedback below. It’d be great to get a discussion going around this talk.