I want to make something clear: Bob is not a fool. He has a background in robotics. He gets paid to run investigations. He is over 60 but he is highly intelligent, adept at tech, and not autistic.
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Tyler thinks too highly of Bob. We can all be foolish about the odd thing, even if we’re highly intelligent. How many very high IQ people have been taken in by someone of the opposite sex? Highly capable does not mean impervious to deception. Bob’s familiarity with and affinity for “tech” may even have made him more susceptible to tech’s charms than a Luddite, for example, because tech people generally regard technology as more reliable and logical than humans.
At this point in time even alert, savvy people are going to need to either rely on actual physical observation/interaction or some way to place a verification mark on transmitted imagery and texts that allows for a 1 time per interaction method of verification.
The sum total of the commercial “threat environment” now is such as to be close to making commercial interaction only secure via in person hand shake and wet ink activity.
There is the general population, and it has money/assets/power. The whole of commerce is structured around how to most efficiently extract money/assets/power from every subset of “general population” down to the individual level. At the individual to X sized group level it is not going to be possible for the aggregate to retain/secure the fruit of their accumulated labor and intellectual efforts within the digital ecosphere. The digital ecosphere will collect and collate, trade, barter and accumulate ALL digital information associated with individuals and, at a probably exponential rate, become increasingly efficient at interacting with them fraudulently to extract their accumulated wealth.
One must now assume that any interaction verbally with either a commercial or fraudulent intent entity over telecommunications systems has created a database of enough of ones oral communications to enable near perfect crafting of same for fraudulent or malicious intent. The same is also probabe for written (type/text) communication by style and habit and also to some extent handwriting from any digital renderings of hand written text.
For every “Bob” that gets punked by ChatGPT(x) there are soon going to be a great multiple of people at risk for losing a LOT if not ALL of their life work returns to crafted constructs wooing, pleading and threatening for some type of gain. The education level for surviving in this era is just not there. It’s like a year or 2 of late elementary to high school education must have a big chunk devoted to “hacking and social engineering recognition” along with introduction to Uniform Commercial Code just to try to survive in this unfolding dystopia of digital bullshit.