Anonymity, AI, and the Internet

July 24, 2025 theheist Capitalism, Economy, Technology 0

Maintaining social discipline

Over our species’ history, we have lived in small groups for roughly 290,000 years, with only the last 10,000 years in mass-scale societies. Our individual and cultural tools included knowing how to evaluate the behaviors of the couple of hundred people in our social sphere. From direct observation over time, we learned who was knowledgeable and reliable. And, as required, we could discipline those who were unreliable, lied, obfuscated, and otherwise misbehaved. We could directly observe what they were doing. And, very importantly, everyone in the group knew that others could see what they were doing and saying. All of this supported social collaboration and mutual support. It also meant that an individual who came under social discipline knew exactly who was imposing the discipline.

We now live in an environment where anonymous behavior is the norm.1 Governments, corporations, religions, nonprofits, social and political groups, and individuals produce a tsunami of speech every day. But, for the most part, we can’t tell who the actual authors are. There is no way for us to apply the cultural tools that we developed over our long, small-group history to maintain the health of our social relations. Lies, fraud, and deceit are omnipresent. Anonymous money drives our political system.

Now we have a new complication in this landscape, AI. It is proving to be capable of the same lies, fraud, and deceit as our human counterparts. Additionally, there is the troubling fact that we have no way of knowing when we are in the presence of AI devices or the products of AI. Anonymous AI is now making decisions about our health, finances, and more, without any way for us to identify that it is happening or which AI systems owned by which corporations or governments are making these decisions.

The short of it is that anonymity is a very destructive, corrosive element in life.

It is time to take two steps.

Ban Anonymous Public Behaviour

First, anonymous political speech and money must be banned. We need to be able to hold people and institutions participating in our lives responsible for what they say and do. This includes our presence on the internet. Social platform spaces on the web should be required to confirm and display the identity of every person and institution that posts material on the web. In the case of institutions, government and corporate, a real human being must be identified as the author of all web postings. You can readily see how such a regime would instantaneously reduce lies, deceit, and fraud. We could begin to impose social discipline.

Ban Anonymous AI

Anytime a human being is in the presence of an AI tool or device or a product of AI, they must be able to easily identify this, as well as the details of what the AI device is and who controls it. This will provide the opportunity to maintain public discipline over AI in our lives. This is already a pressing issue for healthcare decisions.2

Footnotes

  1. When it comes to our individual presence on the web, the other side of anonymity is that corporations, and increasingly government, know exactly who we are, what we are doing, and even where we are at any given moment. They buy and sell information about our lives to marketers. And, as demonstrated by the surveillance state in China, life is becoming increasingly circumscribed by social regulation by government.
  2. See “NAIC Survey Reveals Majority of Health Insurers Embrace AI” (https://content.naic.org/article/naic-survey-reveals-majority-health-insurers-embrace-ai)

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