social Archives - Steve Sammartino

The Future of Truth

Posted on June 27, 2019June 27, 2019 by Steve Sammartino

Technology is on a progressive path to let us fake just about anything. Photoshopped faces, Instagram filters, fake friends and fakes news which is often very difficult to distinguish from the real thing. Like most things tech enables, fake isn’t new – it just scales better than ever.

The internet has a very long memory. In our digital lives, nothing we do ever really disappears. There is no ‘delete’ button. The truth is we’re all wading through a mountain of digital debris which has tracked our lives for the past decade or so. The problem with this debris, however, is that it can be used to build different versions of events. It can retell the story of what we said and what we did in ways which seem indisputable to the human eye.

In an era of Deep Fakes, the last forms of provable truths evaporate right in front of our eyes – video so realistic we can’t tell whether the global leader actually said that at a news conference or whether that celebrity really did make a porn movie. The scariest part? It’s all possible via open source software where a few random pictures and a voice sample can be concocted to create such fakes. This could be life-changing for the victims. They’re already for sale right here for a few hundred dollars. We can even take a single image and make semi-plausible video today as shown in the gif above! Imagine how even more advanced this technology will be in a year or so.

Weirdly, there is some good news. As deep fake videos become so easy to make and so ubiquitous in our digital world, we’ll start to distrust everything we see online. When this happens, what we’ll be only be left with is what happened when we were in the room ourselves. Or we’ll just have to ask the person what actually happened and what was actually said. We will be swimming so deep in fake everything in the coming years that the truth will again morph into something irrevocably human. No digital copy or version of anything will suffice. Analogue truth might just make a comeback.

Even so, that too might also be temporary. The world as we know it moves in technological tides, so the next iteration of deeper fakes will be truly mind-blowing.

Let’s consider something a little crazy. What happens when we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans? Robots with soft-exo bodies, natural sounding voices and smooth movements. Once that becomes possible – and it will – it’s only a matter of time before we have a world in which fake humans leave the screen and enter the street. Then we’ll have to ask ourselves some weird questions like:

Did Steve really come to work today or did he send his robot proxy?

Was the nice girl I met at the event and exchanged numbers with real or humanoid?

Was the Olympic runner who won the 100m dash real or a lab-built improved replica of the human runner?

It’s only just beginning.

– – –

Check out the Latest ep. of 👉 Now-Soon-Later by Future Sandwich. Don’t forget to subscribe for 4 minutes of video goodness every week to give you boardroom worthy soundbites 🙏

Human Tracking

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Steve Sammartino

The mobile revolution has enabled some supposed new forms of human behavior. The ability to leave a footprint of everywhere we go is one of these. As is our ability to geo-locate ourselves with a ‘check in’ and even share this information with whomever we chose.

A lot of people I talk to tell me it is weird and the mobile web going to far. Personally, I feel it is nothing new. It’s just a new iteration of existing human behavior which probably hasn’t changed in centuries. They also say it has massive implications on privacy and that new forms of communication are putting the private lives of all people into question. But there is a simple fact about privacy which straddles all communication – and that is this:

The idea of communication and privacy are naturally juxtaposed to each other.

This means that every iteration in our ability to communicate, takes an equal amount of privacy away. The reason we continue to chose connection over privacy is simple: Improved communications improves the living standards of our species.

Why is geo-locating not weird: Sure, we’ve had and used maps for centuries to guide us. But even the simple idea of a cave painting or a book is a form of geo-locating. It is telling a story of what we saw or what we found, or where we were. I’m sure this process of documenting our experience in these forms seemed weird when it first arrived. The only differences a geo-locating mobile device has is accuracy and immediacy.

How does communications improve the human plight: Knowing more, leads to all of us either having more, or access to more. Sharing, collaborating and specialization is a way to reduce scarcity and increase efficiency. We intuitively share data and lessons because we know subconsciously it is what puts as atop of the food chain. The challenge in the short term is coping psychologically with new methods which seem out of place.

We have a choice: Ultimately these ‘so called weird’ behaviours of sharing, collaborating and pinpointing our location and activities are chosen ones. We can choose not to do any of it. We can chose not to participate in the culture. But as mentioned in my previous post, this will chose to self exclude most often leads to reduced self opportunity and benefits.

Human tracking is a normal and historically relevant activity to improved civilization and living standards. While recent technology has given it a jolt in what is possible, my advice is simple: we are all better off when we embrace the evolution and share in the benefits.

2 horse race

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Steve Sammartino

If you haven’t already read the 22 Laws of marketing – then you should. It’s a short book which really should be called the 22 laws on entrepreneurship. It seems that most of the laws are true on a category scale – the type of scale that startups with big dreams should pay attention two. recently I’ve been reminded of the law 8: The law of duality.

The Law of Duality says that “in the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race.”

The most recent example of this is Twitter and Facebook. it seems as though they’ve won the social web race. Every brand or advertisement is now tagged with ‘find us on Twitter & Facebook’. We have to look pretty hard to find any of the other 400+ social networking sites. It seems the Law of duality is still true almost 2 years after it was written. It seems that certain power laws of dominance still exist, even though we all like to believe the market has fragmented and opened up for everyone….

The truth is there is only so much space in the mind. We can’t carry the baggage of too many ideas with us. So we simplify by limiting what we participate in. There’s lots new world industry examples of the law of duality.

Social: Facebook & Twitter

Search: Google & Bing

Mobile: iPhone & Android

Computers: PC & Mac

The question for internet entrepreneurs, is which new categories are still to get their number 2 player. That is where the opportunity lies.