Co-inverting the Paradigm

Securing the online theater

My interest in artificial intelligence predates the attention I paid to crypto and extended reality. I wish I had gone deeper into AI years earlier when I was in school but didn’t cross paths with it at the time.

As I see it, the three topics fit together and I believe the recent metaverse surge endorses that inevitability.

The scale of content creation and distribution occurring now requires the filters and mechanisms that augmenting ourself with automation will require. I also don’t believe an autonomous intelligences are going to wait on human scales of time.

Defining the Boundaries

The term “metaverse” fails not because it was overhyped but because it’s nerdspeak. It lost to the term “web”, twice now. Though we increasingly persist online, the point should be to pull down the benefits into the real world - not the opposite. Too deeply embracing the virtue of patience likely means the outcomes will be defined by those with an agenda, or more amorphously by committee!

The moment you understand an exponential technology is the moment you missed the opportunity.

~ Brenden C. Maher, Computer Scientist & Futurist

There’s room for these terms to mean distinct ideas, obviously, but as we push to define them into the minuscule spaces between our meaning and intention, there are factions that will colloquially refer to everything as content on the web layer or worse call it “internet” - further generalizing. Retaining clarity of meaning and data requires a constant vigil.

Maintaining information integrity is a critical and widely acknowledged concept in various fields, such as computer systems, business, and government. It entails ensuring that data accuracy and reliability persist through its entire life cycle, from origination to usage and disposal. Without information integrity, numerous issues may surface, including compromised decision-making, security breaches, and a breakdown in system trust. Hence, guaranteeing information integrity is a fundamental aspect of creating a robust and reliable system, which is essential for upholding stakeholders' confidence.

~ Anthony Rogers, CEO BadNano

…and here I am flexing the clarity of my initial point but what I mean to say is that these advances move in cycles, breathing new attention into the topics and sectors regardless of what we call them. We hope we know what we meant, the likely case is that we need to make a more elaborate push on annotations.

Language expands as a result of the time invested into those efforts to better understand each other. But not always, there are those with nebulous intentions - allowing the lack of finite boundaries to widen the lane. I’m not sure we are equipped to understand at all times the intent even if we recognize an act as intentional.

Know what I saying?

Dilating the Language Portal

Synthetic intelligence, with clusters of capacity to specialize around functional knowledge, isn’t going to abide our rules or economic systems once it’s loose in the wild, unconfined and unrestrained by jurisdiction - this will happen. Via “lab leak” or nefarious means; you can count on it, just look at what happened with Stuxnet or, more recently, Facebook’s LLaMA model.

Wars of the future will not be information wars as we currently understand them - they will be wars of programmatic control…. of intelligence and allocation of resources in virtual temporal spaces. AI, Crypto and the Metaverse - the inseparable landscapes of war and innovation.

~ Brenden C. Maher

We can domestically waste our time regulating crypto or social networks, infiltrating the communities with misguided paranoia but the arms race is underway. I believe this is why we have seen a strong push for verification on social networks over the last half decade as well as the pull back of automated functionality on them.

Picking the Lock

Authentication is an essential process to verify the identity of users, particularly as online activity becomes increasingly pervasive. The challenge of managing multiple usernames and passwords for various online platforms is compounded by the overwhelming amount of online content or pervasive content bloat. To combat the rise in cybercriminal activities, such as phishing and other fraudulent activities, robust authentication measures become critical.

~ Anthony Rogers

Security is a fallacy, there is no sustainable lock - only good monitoring. Eventually the security of SHA256 hashing will be cracked and that encryption standard will be lost. Quantum computation feels inevitable and along with it the capacity to crack our current methods at scale. If these outcomes are predetermined then it is important to begin thinking ahead. We should be setting up a hierarchy of protocols that assume these situations are predetermined, in preparation for the assumption that our infrastructure fails.

This is not a position of negative perspective. AI is going to make brute force attacks more brutish, in the sense that there will be more of them and they will have more firepower at their disposal. But then perhaps some things shouldn’t remain a secret anyhow…