As the Internet has grown and now with the advent of AI, the line between true and false, fact and fiction, real and deepfake, will likely become even hazier.
We already knew the truth was in the eye the beholder, but the choices and possibilities for believing and justifying whatever one desires could approach infinity. I hope this is not the beginning of Kurzweil’s Singularity!
What will this mean for how we each think, decide, and act?
How will we know what is actually right or wrong?
How will we know if our personal and professional relationships are sound?
How will this added uncertainty change us?
How will we know ourselves?
Maybe chop wood, carry water?
I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but I’m fairly certain that we are going to spend more time determining the legitimacy of many things that we previously took for granted. It would seem that making important decisions may slow in an ever-increasing avalanche of data. I hope I’m wrong.
Endless research and squabbling about who has the better facts would not seem to be the answer, but that is all we hear: data, data, data.
As my statistics professor once said, give me the right data and I can make the numbers support anything you like. Will that data be yours, someone else’s, or AI’s?
His takeaway? The statistical conclusions should always resonate with your gut. If they don’t, take a another pass. Maybe more importantly, it brings us full circle. Listen and trust yourself.
Then, will burning a lot of time determining the legitimacy of information create an environment or an incentive for people to return to using principles to help gauge the accuracy and nature of a situation, and how to predict or anticipate the future?
Again, I don’t have the answers, but from a libertarian’s perspective, it is tantalizing to think of the possibilities because this pending cosmic confusion could drown an otherwise effective and efficient means of communicating, interacting, and transacting via the Internet.
What would these principles be?
How would they be used, enforced?
Once again, I don’t have the answers, but I’m fairly certain there would be a competition of ideas and the better principles will rest on consistency and transparency in supporting social and economic activity.
That would suggest that the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) would be a leading contender in creating an open broad-based expansion of justice for promoting long-term peace and prosperity – what comes from cooperative human activity.
Murray Rothbard stated the nonaggression principle (NAP) in this way: No one may threaten or commit violence (“aggress”) against another man’s person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor.[1]
Interestingly, libertarianism is the only “ism” that is based upon a single principle that can effectively fairly resolve any disagreement at any level in society. It would alleviate the need for millions of pages of contradicting and unenforceable positive law enacted, the associated special interests, graft, waste, not to mention the entire edifice of governance based on taxation.
Wow! …but there are no free lunches. We will need millions of more lawyers to facilitate and create voluntary contracts, mediate, arbitrate and litigate disputes, and otherwise prevent and more justly and locally resolve a wide variety of social and economic disputes that can all be solved by applying this one true rule of law.
Lawyers would be common craftsmen in this realm, helping people realize their social and economic potential in a world legally based on the NAP. Lawyers would be practicing at the highest moral and legal level of the law, clearly proving Shakespeare got it wrong.
Note: The views expressed are solely the opinion of the author.
Source: SC Striebeck for One Law
Video/Image Source: Custom Direct Inc.
[1] https://mises.org/mises-wire/what-aggression#:~:text=Murray%20Rothbard%20stated%20the%20nonaggression,the%20aggressive%20violence%20of%20another.
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