Dateline: August 17 2031

Did you notice the long delay when opening your website, Facebook, Insta, X, or TikTok feed earlier this morning? No? Well, do we have news for you!

Today is the first day of a new era of people power! Today is the first day since the start of the internet back in 1983, where you can be sure that all data you see is labelled and authenticated. Gone are the days of being fed fake news, creepily good deep fakes, and outright falsehoods.

Last night, the United Nations unleashed its highly disputed data scrubbing AIs across all internet domains and all social media sites. The drastic action was a unique response from a unified world addressing a growing worldwide problem: The avalanche of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AIs that emerged in the early 2020s, mostly trained on un-curated datasets pulled from the internet containing both facts and falsehoods. The hallucinations, incorrect answers, and the divisions they created in society had started to spin out of control.

Spearheaded by the USA and Canada, supported by the AU, EU, ASEAN, UNASUR, BRICS, and The Arab League, the UN General Assembly unanimously agreed to purge the internet of false data. An obvious solution, but one that proved almost impossible to agree on and even harder to implement. Or as one UN Ambassador quipped: “It was easier to agree on protecting peoples’ rights to their own data, than to agree that all data available on the internet should be factually correct or labelled as fiction.”

The freedom of speech movement went into overdrive trying to block the intervention and an acceptable compromise was reached: No data would be erased, but everything would be labelled as Verified Correct, Verified False, Fiction, Opinion, Interpretation of Facts, and Unverified.

The head of the classification task team, Professor Emilia Moore from Tsinghua University, estimates that all sites and social media accounts will be scanned and labelled by Christmas.

Human rights organizations and some companies have voiced grave concerns about the underlying intent, and are warning of “utopian autocratic information control.” The last word in this story has not yet been labelled.

• First published on Mindbullets on September 7 2023

All truth, no lies?

Checking up on the Ministry of Truth

Dateline: 3 July 2029

Covid-19 was a problem, for sure. But misinformation and fake news turned out to be an even bigger virus that needed to be managed.

Between Trump and deep fakes, the last couple of years have shown us that a Ministry of Truth might actually do more good than harm. If we have agencies safeguarding and testing which food products and medicines can be sold, to protect our health and physical well-being, then surely, it’s not too radical to have a dedicated team protecting our minds and mental well-being? Besides, it might greatly reduce the cognitive load for the average citizen, trying to decipher what’s real and what’s fake, right?

Estonia was the first to decide that it was time for a Department of Truth. Everyone believed that the experiment was working surprisingly well, until last week. In what must surely be one of the biggest political scandals of the decade, a whistleblower went online and revealed that the government has been falsifying population statistics for the last eight years.

It seems the number of 20-35-year-olds has been vastly misrepresented when the official figures and profile data were passed onto the Russian authorities – gravely concerned about their aging population. Russian businesses were actively luring younger Estonians to their workforce and catering for their needs. The young Estonians didn’t think twice about leaving, because no at home one was really paying attention to this ‘missing middle’ cohort.

The Estonian government denies any wrongdoing. They claim that it’s been a large-scale and extremely sophisticated hacking attempt by the Russians and that many of their own failed policies for youth are now making sense for the first time.

So, which one is it? No one knows for sure, and now we’re all just left even more confused than before. The Minister of Truth has resigned – or so we’re told…

• First published on Mindbullets on June 18 2020

• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.