AI Fraud, Dollar Hegemony, And More
5 interesting ideas from April
Hello readers,
Welcome to the April roundup, where we discuss 5 intriguing ideas in 5 minutes. The March version was exciting as hell- covering stuff that ranged from the rise of virtual models to deep psychology ideas from Erich Fromm.
These monthly roundups are timeless and can be read any time- they’ve got nothing to do with that month’s news. They are rather collections of ideas I’ve learned and wish to share with passionate learners who keep wondering about abstract ideas and philosophical questions even in the bathroom.
The central idea is to cultivate range in all these conversations, and I’d be obliged if you flood the comments with links to articles/podcasts/papers that you learned from, recently. But wait, there’s a better avenue for those discussions…
This brings me to an important update: I just published my first note on Substack Notes, and would love for you to join me there!
Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for short-form content, like stupid one-liners, short anecdotes, and quick questions which is different from these weekly, long-form articles.
Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Learning Machine, you’ll automatically see my notes and you can share them around, bitch about them or just generally shower me with praises I don’t deserve.
I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Learning Machine can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we’ve all been learning- to turn this into a learning community in the truest sense- where everyone’s getting smarter and having fun in the process week after week.
This month, we’re back with 5 fascinating insights, with a special focus on the topic even our grandmas can’t stop discussing: AI. Let’s go:
AI fraud:
AI tools are doing everything from generating blog posts as we do to generating farts that sound very close to our post-dinner explosions. But there’s a dark side to the possibilities, as evidenced in certain stories of fraud that have already started emerging. These AI advances are a conman’s wet dream because of the ever-greater range of deceptions that are now possible. A scammer used AI to clone a person’s voice and then used it to call his parents and tell them that he was caught by the police and needed immediate cash for the bail. Naturally, thanks to the urgency and the exact reproduction of his voice, the parents got conned. They later called their son and figured out he was all fine and dandy. So what’s the solution? Create a safe word that you can use to identify a family member when you get a call from them (like ‘banana’ or ‘perfume’)- it’ll act like a secret password that you can use to check if they’re real.
Dollar hegemony:
With all the talk of how de-dollarization might happen the day after tomorrow, I was wondering about the implications of being the world’s reserve currency. Is it a curse? Or is it the biggest advantage they could ever ask for? In this nuanced discussion, analyst Lyn Alden suggests that the dollar has covertly wrecked the American manufacturing sector. The reason is simple- a strong dollar means that American exports are costlier for the rest of the world, which renders their local industries uncompetitive. Paradoxically, the biggest export of the US is the dollar itself- the easiest money is made by printing and exporting dollars (and inflation) to the rest of the world. This creates an unsustainable dynamic and sows the seeds for an eventual collapse. But when? Sorry, nobody knows.
Age of average:
Compare the buildings you see in the corporate parks that have been coming up and they all look the same. The cozy Airbnb stays across the world that travelers love booking? They’re converging to the same contemporary style. The Instagram look. Coffee shop layouts. Car designs. Brand logos. So many aspects of our culture are all merging into a sea of sameness and converging onto the same, hyper-generic style. Why? Maybe because the average is the safest bet for brands, or maybe because we seek familiarity in turbulent times. Heck, we can even see how Midjourney and Dall-E generated cyberart is already starting to look so similar and easily identifiable. But there’s a major opportunity here across fields. When everyone’s converging to the same boring standard, it opens up mega-opportunities for creative folks to break the script and do things differently. That’s what we’re trying at The Minimalist.
History of Jihad:
I’ve written in the past about the pivotal moment in our history that initiated the process of subjugation and domination by invaders like Muhammad Ghori, who eventually laid the foundations of the Delhi Sultanate. But the attacks on India, even if you leave aside the plunders of Ghazni, started much earlier in the 8th Century, when Muhammad Qasim raided Sindh and enforced conversion to Islam on the inhabitants. I was trying to understand the idea behind Jihad and its origins when I came across this provocative talk. Robert Spencer claims that the idea of waging a holy war against unbelievers has been written in the holy book itself, and it’s based on those dictates that many plunderers have carried out religiously-motivated wars which has wrecked many countries in the last thousand years.
The Cure to Misinformation:
As AI tools get deployed to generate bullshit and misinformation at scale, people are fearing that we’re at risk of a fake-news apocalypse, though one has to wonder if we aren’t living in one already. Still, things can certainly get worse as deep-fakes and genuine-sounding bullshit can hatch conspiracy theories and fool people into taking dangerous actions. The author of this article offers a counterintuitive solution- to not do anything (especially to ditch the idea that we can somehow “regulate” the internet to prevent the spread of misinfo) and let the fake news float around. Rather, we must actively tax our minds to separate what’s true from all the noise- and this can work just like hormesis, a process where one continuously exposes their body to a minor dose of poison to develop immunity against it. King Mithridates, out of his fear of being poisoned, took this process to such an extreme that he became completely immune to poisoning. Ultimately, when he wanted to commit suicide, he couldn’t poison himself at all and had to ask his guard to do the honors with a sword!
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