The Fiction That We Live

Mark Twain understood that fiction would stick to what is possible while truth would embrace the impossible. As artificial intelligence and augmented virtual reality becomes more widely accepted and embraced we are at a crossroads not seen since Greek mythology. Theseus was a sailor who replaced parts of his ship throughout his storied voyagers. After many years he had replaced every single piece of his boat. At what point in time did his ship change from the original to the replaced?

In society there are storytellers who are altering reality with fictional tails that many believe and share with their friends and family. Dinesh D’Souza’s film, 2000 Mules, relied on fictional reality. True the Vote has presented that “mules” coordinated to collect and deposit ballots in Atlanta in November 2020 and January’s runoff in 2021. In the film they use cell phone pings to create a convincing story. Two weeks ago they were unable to provide any evidence for the story they shared with D’Souza and the viewers of the film.

Google’s artificial intelligence named, Gemini, is distorting reality. In a story published by Peter Hasson, Gemini was discovered writing fake reviews of content critical of google. The AI was using real people as the name’s of the reviewers, but fraudulently writing on their behalf. Knowing that AI can augment the perception by lying to the public about content, we are now with Theseus. Which part of the internet is untarnished? Can we trust what we read and see by those we know?

As Google Glass, Apple Vision Pro, and Facebook’s Metaverse become augmented reality, have we stopped having a human experience? At what point did we cross a line to transhumanism? Was it inevitable? We are living now in a fictional reality.