Every time you go online, you pass through your mind a huge stream of information that you trust to a greater or lesser extent.
You trust search engines that respond to your request with a list of links to content. You trust, to a greater or lesser extent, the photo and video content that you perceive. You trust well-known digital platforms when you read the description of the materials presented on them for review. You trust sites when you see logos and names that you remember previously. Trust the people you communicate with on social networks and what you see in their feeds.
All this trust refers to the imaginary authors and current owners of the content who control it, and whom you by default consider to be more or less conscientious people. The bad news is that these people are not always conscientious, and the content is not always reliable. Even worse, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence on the Internet, it very often turns out that these are not even people anymore, but entire automated systems of disinformation.
Who among us has not at least once in our lives fallen upon phishing resources that are almost indistinguishable from sites of real Internet services? Who among us has not encountered distorted news, accompanied by photos and videos taken from other content and context? Who hasn’t encountered product descriptions on digital platforms that don’t correspond to reality? Who, when buying something in p2p systems, has never encountered unscrupulous sellers? Has it happened at least once in your life to trust well-presented but non-existent “investment advisors”, having actually given money to scammers in a scam project or a fake “investment scheme”?
These are just simple examples of misleading a naive Internet user. More sophisticated digital systems do not deceive you directly, but, for example, structure the delivery of content on social media feeds in such a way as to influence your perception of the world. They structure the issuance of links in search queries so that you find only what customers who want to shape your digital reality want.
You do not realize that the monitor screen is often no longer a mirror that, through digital resources, reflects objective reality somewhere at the other end of the communication lines. Digital systems have now appeared that can reproduce your appearance along with your voice so reliably that your friends will not distinguish you if such a “digital double” calls them in the messenger and starts communicating on your behalf.
We are used to trusting each other in the real world. This is our nature, which allows us to learn from childhood from those who already know the real world. But there is another side to our nature—selfishness—that allows us to effectively adapt and survive as individuals. Alas, the survival of some people at the expense of the lack of information and excessive openness of others is not prohibited by nature. This is prohibited by morality, but on the Internet of fakes morality is powerless. The institution of reputation, which works well in the real world and punishes deception, works worse and worse in the digital world, in which it is impossible to identify the real owner of the content and the initiator of communication.
Reputation is the basis of long-term trust and relationships, both human and economic. Reputation is what allows credit to exist. And credit is the lifeblood of the economy. No digital economy can exist as an independently developing sphere as long as there is no digital credit in it. But it doesn’t exist because there is no digital institution of reputation. At best, there are only a huge number of disparate services that, on different resources, in a semi-automatic mode, somehow monitor the compliance of digital content with reality, and the correspondence of accounts to real users where identification is required. In the world of artificial intelligence and the ever-increasing flow of information, these services are rapidly becoming hopelessly archaic. The Internet economy remains without blood - without the money that it could create in itself. And for classical finance, it remains an area of high risk, both transactional and investment.
If you have made it through this text up to this paragraph, then you can realize: those who create digital mechanics for personalization and authentication of digital content, identification of subjects and their connections with each other, effective for modern conditions, will be the first to lay the foundations of the institution of digital reputation. And therefore - the cornerstone in the foundation of the growing digital economy of the future.
And they are. Those who do it. This is the TNS project team. A project that is starting the Digital Revolution right now. Join the Revolution with your money, reputation, social connections to multiply all this in a short time.
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