The ubiquity of phone cameras have shown us that ghosts and alien encounters are extremely rare, possibly not real, and that abusive police officers and school teachers are pretty common. I suspect AI isn’t going to change that any more than photoshop will, since for implausible events we’ll expect multiple captures of the same thing, or for them to happen with enough frequency they become plausible.
AI will turn into the new fake news, where politicians signalling to their base can argue a comment was artificially created and will instill doubt in those that want that doubt, much like Trump’s sex encounters at Epstein parties (really happened. Victims were scared away from testifying by mobster threats in 2016)
There is absolutely no evidence that ghosts or aliens are real. There is documentation of UFOs, but the fact that we do not know what they are does not demonstrate the existence of aliens.
In the 1970s, the show That’s Incredible showed plenty of evidence that ghosts haunted places like the Winchester House. In the 1990s and even the aughts, ghost-hunting shows were popular on television. But since then, when someone is able to posit accidental camera effects were responsible for a given image, that information spread worldwide like a California wildfire.
When I was growing up, it was common knowledge that the Bermuda Triangle mysteriously ate planes and boats for reasons we couldn’t quite fathom. Nowadays, we can look up and find that the rate that they get lost to common elements is exactly what can be statistically expected for seas with treacherous elements. While some favored incidents might have required a combination of unfortunate conditions, they became unlikely misfortune rather than supernatural misfortune.
When the documentry Chariots of the Gods came out, we didn’t have the direct access to reports by people who actually study the origins of hill figures, carved caves and the heads on Easter Island, so when someone told us it’s aliens, we couldn’t just look up a report by a cultural anthropologist who studied the things. Now, in this age, we can, and reports of aliens, ghosts and feats of engineering done with paleolithic technology are so routine that skepticism is the norm when someone suggests an unusual hypothesis.
It’s not perfect. Some people still believe a toxoplasma gondii infection makes a human really, really fond of cats (it doesn’t, but strangely it does have a consistent symptom of desiring and enjoying high-speed travel) but now we have the capacity to look it up, and so when urban myths become a topic in a group, commonly someone will get curious enough to see if someone published a report.
The Fermi Paradox tells us that even though we do not have evidence other life exists outside our own, we are the living evidence that life could exist in our universe, so the possibility of aliens existing in our expansive universe is enormous.
We are detecting organic compounds on other worlds at this point, which isn’t quite evidence of life, but al least evidence of the processes that made for abiogenesis here here on earth.
As for advanced civilizations, yeah we need to colonize other worlds, ourselves before assuming civilizations can advance enough to escape their own homes or probe other stars. Threats of nuclear war and ecological collapse are still great filters we’ve yet to pass, ourselves.
The ubiquity of phone cameras have shown us that ghosts and alien encounters are extremely rare, possibly not real, and that abusive police officers and school teachers are pretty common. I suspect AI isn’t going to change that any more than photoshop will, since for implausible events we’ll expect multiple captures of the same thing, or for them to happen with enough frequency they become plausible.
AI will turn into the new fake news, where politicians signalling to their base can argue a comment was artificially created and will instill doubt in those that want that doubt, much like Trump’s sex encounters at Epstein parties (really happened. Victims were scared away from testifying by mobster threats in 2016)
There is absolutely no evidence that ghosts or aliens are real. There is documentation of UFOs, but the fact that we do not know what they are does not demonstrate the existence of aliens.
In the 1970s, the show That’s Incredible showed plenty of evidence that ghosts haunted places like the Winchester House. In the 1990s and even the aughts, ghost-hunting shows were popular on television. But since then, when someone is able to posit accidental camera effects were responsible for a given image, that information spread worldwide like a California wildfire.
When I was growing up, it was common knowledge that the Bermuda Triangle mysteriously ate planes and boats for reasons we couldn’t quite fathom. Nowadays, we can look up and find that the rate that they get lost to common elements is exactly what can be statistically expected for seas with treacherous elements. While some favored incidents might have required a combination of unfortunate conditions, they became unlikely misfortune rather than supernatural misfortune.
When the documentry Chariots of the Gods came out, we didn’t have the direct access to reports by people who actually study the origins of hill figures, carved caves and the heads on Easter Island, so when someone told us it’s aliens, we couldn’t just look up a report by a cultural anthropologist who studied the things. Now, in this age, we can, and reports of aliens, ghosts and feats of engineering done with paleolithic technology are so routine that skepticism is the norm when someone suggests an unusual hypothesis.
It’s not perfect. Some people still believe a toxoplasma gondii infection makes a human really, really fond of cats (it doesn’t, but strangely it does have a consistent symptom of desiring and enjoying high-speed travel) but now we have the capacity to look it up, and so when urban myths become a topic in a group, commonly someone will get curious enough to see if someone published a report.
The Fermi Paradox tells us that even though we do not have evidence other life exists outside our own, we are the living evidence that life could exist in our universe, so the possibility of aliens existing in our expansive universe is enormous.
We are detecting organic compounds on other worlds at this point, which isn’t quite evidence of life, but al least evidence of the processes that made for abiogenesis here here on earth.
As for advanced civilizations, yeah we need to colonize other worlds, ourselves before assuming civilizations can advance enough to escape their own homes or probe other stars. Threats of nuclear war and ecological collapse are still great filters we’ve yet to pass, ourselves.