by Eric W. Austin

In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, the problem of misinformation looms larger than ever before. The information landscape has changed drastically over recent decades, and many of us have not developed the tools to discern good information from bad quickly enough to keep pace with these changes. Let’s explore how things were in the past, how they have evolved, and what we can do to navigate this new terrain.

In the past, our information was filtered through a series of gatekeepers, such as teachers, librarians, publishers, newspapers, and the major news broadcasters. These gatekeepers, equipped with the skills to discern reliable information, ensured that the public received mostly accurate news and information. This system fostered a relatively unified understanding of the world, which was particularly valuable in times of crisis. However, it also meant that a small group decided which narratives were worthy of dissemination, limiting the diversity of perspectives.

The landscape began to shift in the late 1980s with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a policy that required broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues. Whether one views this as a positive change or not, its repeal allowed for the rise of ideologically driven news stations catering to specific segments of the population, leading to the ideological drift and “information bubbles” we see today.

The advent of the internet further transformed the information landscape. Traditional gatekeepers were bypassed, and information became ubiquitous and accessible to all. This democratization of information had its benefits, allowing for a greater diversity of viewpoints and giving voice to previously suppressed perspectives. However, it also meant that anyone, regardless of their expertise or intentions, could disseminate information widely. This led to a reliance on emotional responses and confirmation bias to determine the value of information rather than its truthfulness or societal benefit.

Social media platforms, particularly with the introduction of Facebook’s “Like” button in 2009, exacerbated the problem. These platforms reward content that generates engagement, often prioritizing sensational or misleading information. The lack of accountability for false or harmful content has allowed misinformation to flourish, with creators incentivized by the prospect of financial gain through ad revenue sharing on platforms like YouTube and Twitter (now X).

The influence of social media influencers has further complicated the landscape. Individuals can amass millions of followers based on content like pranks or lifestyle posts, and then leverage that influence to spread conspiracies or misinformation. This unchecked power can be exploited by political, criminal, or foreign entities for nefarious purposes.

New Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have made the situation even more perilous. AI can create photorealistic images, simulate voices, and generate realistic videos, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and fake content. This technological advancement, combined with the breakdown of traditional gatekeeping, has created a breeding ground for misinformation.

So, what can we do about it? First, we must recognize the need to develop new skills for discerning good information from bad. Many of us overestimate our ability to identify reliable information. To counter this, we should seek out media literacy classes, read books on detecting fake information, and educate ourselves about common biases and fallacies. Media literacy education should also be integrated into school curriculums to prepare future generations for this new information environment.

Here are a few practical tips to navigate the current landscape:

• Find Trusted Sources: Identify credible sources from across the political spectrum. Research them thoroughly and use them as a benchmark to evaluate new information.
• Be Aware of Bias: Acknowledge your own biases and be cautious of information that confirms your preconceptions.
• Verify Information: Be skeptical of information from unknown sources, especially screenshots of articles or headlines shared on social media.
• Research Your Sources Thoroughly: Check the credibility of new sources using tools like AllSides, MediaBiasFactCheck, and Ground News. Scan a source’s Wikipedia page and do a Google search to identify any red flags. Also, look for funding transparency from websites and news organizations.

Ultimately, we must remain vigilant and humble. Overconfidence in our ability to discern truth from falsehood makes us more susceptible to deception. By staying informed and critically evaluating the information we consume, we can better navigate this complex information landscape and make informed decisions, especially as we approach the crucial 2024 elections.

This picture was generated with the MidJourney AI image creation tool, using the following description: “A 16:9 image of a futuristic city in ruins, with skyscrapers crumbling and fires burning. The sky is bright and orange, with clouds of smoke and dust. In the center of the image, a giant metal robot stands on the ground, holding a gun in its right hand and a sword in its left. The robot is sleek and shiny, with wires and antennas on its head. It has a large eye-like lens in the middle of its face, and a mouth-like grill below it. It is the AI that has caused the apocalypse, and it is looking for any survivors to eliminate. The image is at a high resolution of 5K, with sharp details and vivid colors. The image conveys a mood of horror and despair, as the AI dominates the world and destroys humanity.”

by Eric W. Austin

Can machines think? How do we even define thinking, and how can we recognize it in anyone other than ourselves? These questions are becoming increasingly important as recent advancements in artificial intelligence blur the line between human cognition and digital simulation. The progress made in language processing through the use of neural networks, which simulate the functioning of a human brain, has yielded results that have surprised many, including myself. In this article, I will share my experience playing with two of these new tools over the past several weeks.

On the most basic level, the two major breakthroughs in AI fall into two broad categories: textual processing and image generation. New tools and apps that employ this new technology are popping up in different variations everywhere, so there are many different tools to try out, but this article is based on my experience with two of the most popular: Chat-GPT and MidJourney AI.

First, let’s discuss the technology behind these advances in artificial intelligence and why they represent such a significant leap forward in achieving human-like responses from a computer. Traditional AI was primarily rules-based, with programmers coding specific instructions for situations the computer might encounter. While effective, this approach was limited by the programmer’s foresight. If the computer encountered an unplanned situation, it would be at a loss. Rules-based AI worked well for simple cause-and-effect relationships between human actions and computer responses, but programming a computer to perform more subtle tasks, such as distinguishing between the images of a dog and a cat, or writing an original essay, proved to be more challenging.

Rather than attempting to develop a program capable of handling every conceivable situation, researchers focused instead on creating learning machines inspired by the human mind and utilizing statistical modeling techniques. Terminology used to describe this technology often reflects the human physiology that inspired it. This new AI is constructed from layers of neurons that transmit information from one layer to the next, while applying sophisticated statistical modeling in order to “understand” the data it is processing.

Connections between these artificial neurons, similar to the connections between neurons in the human brain, are referred to as “synapses” and determine the flow of information within the neural network. Each neuron can be thought of as a mathematical function or algorithm that processes input data, performs a calculation, and generates a result. This output is then used as input for other neurons, which carry out additional calculations, applies further processing and passes the results along to subsequent neurons in lower-level layers.

This process converts any kind of digital input provided into numerical data that the computer can understand. The kind of input data can be diverse, ranging from a sentence in English to a picture of a squirrel. Once the input has been transformed into millions of computational data points, the AI utilizes concepts from statistical modeling to identify patterns within the result. Returning to our earlier example of distinguishing dogs, developers feed thousands of dog images into the computer. The AI then analyzes each image and detects patterns the images have in common. With feedback from developers on correct and incorrect outputs, the artificial intelligence can adjust its own models to improve results without requiring additional human programming. This process of providing data to the AI in order to improve its modeling is known as training. Once the AI has been trained to recognize specific patterns common to dog images, it can successfully identify previously unseen pictures of dogs.

Since the AI has been trained to recognize patterns and features specific to dog images, it can then utilize this knowledge to create new, original images of dogs. This is achieved through a process called generative modeling. The AI essentially learns the underlying structure and distribution of the data it has been trained on, which allows it to generate new data samples that share similar characteristics. In the case of dog images, the AI has learned the various features, such as shapes, colors, and textures, that are commonly found in pictures of dogs. By combining and manipulating these features, the AI can generate entirely new images of dogs that, while unique, still resemble real dogs in appearance. This creative capability has numerous applications, only some of which are we starting to understand or apply.

The same modeling techniques used for processing images of dogs can be applied to understanding language or analyzing other complex input. When applied on a large scale, the AI can recognize a wider variety of objects and interpret intricate input data. For instance, instead of merely examining pictures of dogs, the AI can analyze entire movies, identifying all the objects in each scene. Furthermore, it can detect patterns not only in the objects themselves but also in the relationships between them. In this manner, the AI can begin to understand the world in ways that mirror our own.

Since the AI perceives language and image information as interchangeable forms of data, it can translate textual descriptions into image data and vice versa. This means that users can describe a scene to an AI in natural language, and it can then generate an image based on their specifications. This capability has led to the development of various tools for creating artwork, of which MidJourney and Leonardo AI are two of the most popular and advanced. For example, I used the MidJourney AI tool to create the accompanying original image of a rogue robot standing in the rubble of an American city. See the caption on the photo to see what description I used to generate the image.

Unlike MidJourney, which generates images, Chat-GPT focuses on producing text. At its core, it shares similarities with the predictive text functionality found on modern smartphones. As users begin typing messages on their devices, the interface attempts to predict the intended word to speed up typing. Chat-GPT operates on a similar principle, but with far greater complexity and sophistication. Instead of merely suggesting individual words, Chat-GPT is capable of creating entire sentences and paragraphs. The applications for this are almost limitless. It can engage in knowledgeable conversations on almost any subject in a manner that is strikingly human-like and contextually responsive. It can compose essays with minimal input. In the business world, this technology has the potential to replace customer support representatives, secretaries, and any job requiring language understanding and interpretation, an area that has long eluded automation efforts.

This article has only provided a glimpse into the intricate and expansive world of this new technology. Numerous topics remain unexplored, such as the countless applications this technology can be applied to, the ethical and legal ramifications, and the potential issues surrounding AI bias or manipulation. A more in-depth discussion of these aspects will be reserved for future articles. Nevertheless, it is evident that this technology will transform our world in ways we cannot yet fathom, and it will likely do so in the very near future.

The personal computer took 20 years to revolutionize our lives, while the smartphone achieved a similar impact in under a decade. These latest advancements in artificial intelligence are poised to bring about even more profound changes in a much shorter timeframe – possibly within a few years or even months. So, buckle up, my friends, the AI apocalypse has arrived!

Eric W. Austin writes about technology and community topics. Contact him by email at ericwaustin@gmail.com.

A mosaic depicting Alexander the Great in battle, discovered in the city of Pompeii, superimposed with the face of Mark Zuckerberg.

by Eric W. Austin

There is something in the philosophy of history variously called the Whig interpretation of history, Whig historiography, or just Whig history. It’s a view that sees the historical record as an inexorable push toward greater progress and civilization. In this view of the past, society is on a continuous path from savagery to civility, constantly improving, becoming freer, always taking two steps forward for any regrettable step back.

This idea gained popularity during the 18th century Enlightenment and was epitomized in the writings of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and in works such as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by English historian Edward Gibbon, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. Other Enlightenment thinkers, like David Hume, criticized the approach, and it lost some favor in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I and II, but the Whig view of history is still held by many people today, even if they may not be aware of its history or what to call it. There is an almost intuitive acceptance of the idea in modern culture.

As a social philosophy, it served as a driving force in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, expressed most eloquently in a 1968 speech at the Washington National Cathedral by Martin Luther King, Jr., where he said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” More recently, former President Barack Obama alluded to this sentiment after the 2016 election, saying, “You know, the path this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that’s OK.” We may zig and zag but, ultimately, we are moving forward.

I have long been fascinated with this idea of history as a progression, ultimately, toward improvement. There is something comforting about it, something hopeful. And something obvious too. In our modern world where technology is constantly improving and offering us additional benefits, it’s easy to fall into thinking that continuous progress is part of some immutable law of nature, that progress is inevitable.

In recent years, however, I have grown more skeptical of the idea. For one thing, we have to ask: progress for whom? We generally judge outcomes based on our own present circumstances — in other words, we see our history as “progress” because we are the outcome of that history. We are the product of a cultural progression that produced us. The winners write the history, and their descendants read that history and deem it “progress”. But was it progress from the perspective of the Native American tribes that were wiped out by the coming of Europeans? Did Christianity represent progress for the pagans of the 4th century Roman Empire who were watching their traditions being replaced and superseded by a new religion? We tend to view the past as progress because we are the end products of the winning side. A natural bias, perhaps. The more serious error comes when we use this view of the past to make assumptions about the future.

Often social change is driven by technological innovations, particularly advances in how we communicate. Think about the invention of writing as one of those advancements that transformed, over a thousand years, oral societies into written ones. We take writing for granted today, but at the time it was revolutionary. No longer did you need to trust someone else’s recollection of past events. Now you had a written record, essentially immutable and unchangeable, at least in theory. Agreements could be written down and later referred to as a way to settle disputes. History could be recorded and preserved for future generations.

Writing brought many benefits to society. Most importantly, the ability to reliably preserve knowledge allowed subsequent generations to more easily build on the progress of past generations. But writing also introduced new conflicts about who would control how that information was preserved. In many ways, writing imposed new cultural restrictions on the ordinary person who had grown up in an oral society. There was now an official version of a story, and any interpretation that differed from it could be judged “wrong”. Control over the historical narrative was now dictated by an elite group with the specialized skills required to read and write. Writing made culture more transportable, but it also made culture easier to police. Writing introduced new cultural gatekeepers and also new conflicts.

The Bible tells the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), in which an early society comes together to build a tower to reach the heavens. Seeing this act as the height of arrogance, God strikes the people with a confusion of languages, confounding their undertaking and, unable any longer to communicate, they scatter across the earth. While the story is probably an origin myth meant to explain why various peoples speak different languages, it contains an important truth about the power of communication in human endeavors.

The conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE serve as a foil to the story of the Tower of Babel and illustrates how fundamental communication is to the evolution of culture. Alexander was the ruler of Macedon, a kingdom located north of the Greek peninsula. Although there was debate even at the time about whether Macedonians were considered Greek, there is no question that Alexander was a devotee of Greek culture. Influenced by his tutor, the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle, Alexander sought to spread Greek culture in the lands he conquered. By the time of his death in 323 BCE at the age of 32, his empire was one of the largest in history and included Greece, the Middle East, Northern Africa (Egypt), and stretched as far east as India.

A map of the territory conquered by Alexander the Great. (photo credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

But Alexander was not just a conqueror of territory, he was also a cultural evangelist. He was, by some reasonable estimates, the most influential figure in the history of Western civilization. During his short, 13-year military career, he founded dozens of cities (many named after himself) in the style of the Greek polis, or city-state of Ancient Greece. Most importantly, because of his influence, the Greek language became the lingua franca – the common language – for the entire region. Alexander the Great is the reason the New Testament was written in Greek. What God had torn asunder at the Tower of Babel, Alexander put back together again.

It’s important to note that while we may see this as progress now, and one of the foundational periods in the development of Western civilization, it was also an incredibly destructive process for the societies going through it. Greek culture replaced, or in many cases, merged with the existing native cultures to create a hybridized version in a process referred to by historians as Hellenization.

Rome later built upon the foundations that Alexander had laid down, although Roman culture was more about assimilation than innovation. Rome built the infrastructure, and through the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”) created the stability that allowed Greek culture and ideas to flourish and spread in the centuries following Alexander’s conquests. Not only were Rome’s famous roads essential to the flow of goods throughout the empire, but also ideas, and ideas are the seeds of culture.

Aside from the invention of writing and the conquests of Alexander, the next most consequential advancement in human communication came in 1436 with the invention of the printing press. This changed the communication game in significant ways and kicked off a knowledge revolution that would lead to the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment, which introduced many of the ideas that have come to define modern society, including the scientific method of investigating the natural world and the “rights of man” which were enshrined in the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

An artist’s rendering of Johannes Gutenberg in his workshop.

By removing the human element from the copying process, the printing press both increased the accuracy of shared information and reduced its cost. As the cost of reproduction dropped, the written word became accessible to more ordinary people, which encouraged the spread of literacy in the general population. Ultimately, this led to the Protestant Reformation, with a large number of Christians breaking from the Roman Catholic Church. Christians could now read the Bible for themselves and no longer had to rely on those with special access to the written word for their interpretation. Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, is alleged to have quipped, “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.”

The printing press removed many of the obstacles between the ordinary person and the written word and resulted in a proliferation of ideas, both good and bad. The witch hunting craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, during which an estimated 50,000 people, mostly older women, were executed on suspicion of practicing witchcraft, was in part fueled by the printing and widespread availability of one book, the Malleus Maleficarum, roughly translated as the Hammer of Witches, published in 1468 by two Catholic clergyman, Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger. The book purported to teach readers how to identify a witch and turned many ordinary people into demonic detectives. The result: witch hunting hysteria. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a phenomenon inspired by the spread of literacy, combined with a highly-charged religious environment, in the decades after the introduction of the printing press.

Whether we’re talking about Roman roads, the printing press, or more recent inventions like the telephone, radio, television or the internet, social change is usually preceded by advancements in communication technology. But these advancements have often been a double-edged sword and are frequently accompanied by periods of heightened conflict, and an increased propensity for hysterical thinking in the general public. We treasure the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, but we can’t forget the brutality of the French Revolution, even though both were inspired by similar cultural ideals.

There are many parallels between the impact of the printing press on society and what we are seeing today with the internet. Like the printing press, the internet has eliminated obstacles between information and the average consumer. And like every other time this has happened, it’s leading to social upheaval as people adjust to the new information landscape. As in the past, people are asking, is this a good or a bad thing? Does this make society better or worse?

On one hand, the internet empowers those who previously had no power. It provides a platform for those who before had no voice. But, on the other hand, it enables the digital equivalent of witch burnings. Good information has never been so accessible, but wild theories also proliferate online and influence how people vote, how they make health decisions, and who they love or hate. People have access to all the information in the world, but do they have the wisdom to discern the good from the bad?

Is this what progress feels like? Do we zig zag through history but always move forward? Does giving people more access to information always benefit society? These are some of the questions that have been bouncing around my head in recent years. Will people 200 years from now look back on the social changes we are going through today and see it as progress? I think they will, but not because history inevitably marches towards something we can objectively label as “progress”. It will be because they are the end products of the cultural conflicts we are living through right now, and viewed from the destination, whatever path history takes you down will look like progress to those at the end of the race.

Contact the author at ericwaustin@gmail.com.

by Eric W. Austin

There’s a new wireless technology being rolled out this year that promises to be the biggest technological revolution since the invention of the cell phone. Dubbed 5G NR (“fifth generation new radio”), this isn’t just an upgrade to the existing 4G cellular network, but a radical reinvention of wireless technology that will require an enormous investment in new infrastructure, but also promises massive improvements in bandwidth, speed and latency.

This new cellular technology achieves these incredible improvements by making fundamental changes to the way cellular networks function. Whereas the old 4G technology used radio waves in the microwave band between 700 MHz and 3 GHz to communicate, 5G will tap into previously unused radio frequencies in ranges from 30 Ghz to 300 Ghz, known as millimeter bands. In addition, the new 5G technology will transmit across wider frequency channels of up to 400 Mhz, compared with 4G’s limit of only 20 Mhz.

Now, that may sound like a lot of technobabble, but it has real world implications, so let me explain.

A radio wave can be imagined as a wavy line traveling through space at the speed of light. Information is transmitted by manipulating the crests and valleys that make up that wavy line, much like the dots and dashes in Morse Code. The number of crests and valleys in a radio wave that pass a point in space in a specific amount of time determines the quantity of information transmitted. This is called the frequency of a radio wave. Since you can’t increase the speed at which a radio wave travels (it will always travel at the speed of light), the only way to increase information transfer is to increase the number of crests and valleys within a single radio wave. This is done by increasing its frequency. You can think of this as the difference between a wavy piece of string and a tightly coiled spring. While both the string and the spring are made from material of the same length, the spring will contain a greater number of crests and valleys and take up considerably less space. This is the basic concept behind the move in 5G to transmit using higher frequency radio waves.

Since the higher frequency radio waves of 5G technology are capable of transmitting a much greater amount of data than earlier microwave-based 4G technology, one can reasonably ask, why aren’t we using it already? The answer is simple. These high-frequency waves are much smaller, with their crests and valleys more tightly packed together, and therefore require receivers which are much more sensitive and difficult to manufacture. While such receivers have been available for military applications for a number of years, it has taken time for it to become cost effective to produce such receivers for wider commercial use. That time has now come.

The ability to fit more information into smaller transmissions, in addition to the use of wider frequency channels, means a hundredfold increase in data transfer times, and lower power consumption for devices.

However, there are also some significant downsides to using these higher frequencies. While millimeter waves can pack more information into a single broadcast, their shorter wavelength means they can also be easily blocked by obstacles in the environment and absorbed by atmospheric gases. Although the antennas needed to receive these transmissions will be much smaller than the giant cell towers in use today, we will need more of them because 5G antennas require line-of-sight in order to receive transmissions. Instead of cell towers every few miles, as we have for our current 4G/3G cellular network, hundreds of thousands of smaller antennas will have to be installed on office buildings, telephone poles and traffic lights.

This new 5G technology couldn’t have been implemented earlier because it requires the existing fourth generation infrastructure already in place in order to make up for these deficiencies.

While the new 5G technology has some real benefits to human user experience, like having enough bandwidth to stream 50 4K movies simultaneously, speeds that are 20 times greater than the average U.S. broadband connection, and the ability to download a high definition movie in less than a second, the real excitement lies in how this upgrade will benefit the machines in our lives.

A confluence of technologies ripening in the next few years are set to revolutionize our lives in a way that promises to be greater than the sum of the individual parts: this new, high-speed 5G cellular upgrade; artificial intelligence; and the rapidly widening world of the Internet of Things (IoT). These three technologies, each with astonishing potential on their own, will combine to change our lives in ways that we can only begin to imagine.

I have spent this article talking about 5G, and you have likely heard a bit about the emerging field of artificial intelligence, but the final item on this list, the Internet of Things, bears a bit of explaining. The Internet of Things is an industry buzzword referencing the increasing level of sophistication built into everyday appliances. Your car now routinely has cameras, GPS locators, accelerometers and other sensors installed in it. Soon nearly every electrical device in your house will be similarly equipped. In the future, when you run out of milk, your refrigerator will add milk to a list of needed items stored in the cloud. On your way to the grocery store, your home A.I. will send a message ahead of you and robots at the store will prepare a shopping cart with the requested items, which will be waiting for you when you arrive. Stepping through your front door after a long day at work, your phone will ping you with a list of recipes you can prepare for dinner based on the items you’ve recently purchased.

This is the Internet of Things. It’s every device in your life quietly communicating behind the scenes in order to make your life easier. Although this idea might seem a bit creepy at first, it’s coming whether you like it or not. According to statistics website Statista.com, there are currently more than 26 billion devices worldwide communicating in this way. By 2025, that number is expected to top 75 billion.

The upgrade to 5G, with its increases in speed and bandwidth, is not so much a benefit to us humans as it is an aid to the machines in our life. As more and more devices come on line and begin to communicate with each other, the demand for greater speed and bandwidth will increase exponentially. Soon the devices in your house will be using more bandwidth than you are.

There are also some significant security concerns arising from the need to build additional infrastructure to support the new 5G network. It will require the installation of billions of antennas and 5G modems across the world, in every town, city and government building. But who will build them? According to a February 2019 article in Wired magazine, “as of 2015, China was the leading producer of 23 of the 41 elements the British Geological Society believes are needed to ‘maintain our economy and lifestyle’ and had a lock on supplies of nine of the 10 elements judged to be at the highest risk of unavailability.” With this monopoly on the materials needed for high tech production, Chinese companies like Huawei, which is already the largest telecommunications manufacturer in the world, are set to corner the market on 5G equipment.

You may have heard of Huawei from the news recently, as the U.S. government has accused the company of everything from violating international sanctions to installing backdoors in the hardware they manufacture on behalf of the Chinese government. China’s second largest telecommunications company, ZTE, who is also looking to seize a piece of the emerging 5G pie, has been the subject of similar accusations, and last year paid more than $1.4 billion in fines for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

Do we really want to build our communications infrastructure with equipment made by companies with close ties to the Chinese government? It’s a real concern for security experts in the U.S. and other western countries. Fortunately, European companies like Nokia and Ericsson, South Korea’s Samsung and California’s Cisco Systems are emerging as threats to this Chinese monopoly.

The new technology of 5G is set to revolutionize cellular communications in the next few years, but the real story is how the confluence of technologies like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, in combination with this upgrade in communications, will change our lives in ways we can’t possibly foresee. The 5G future will be glorious, exciting, and fraught with danger. Are you ready for it?