I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
The mere possibility that it is possible to fabricate evidence does not usually create reasonable doubt. After all, it is possible to fabricate all sorts of evidence, from testimony to physical evidence. Of course you never know what a jury will say, but you would generally need at least some evidence that the evidence was fabricated. That's why evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of racial epithets was admissible in the OJ Simpson trial: it corroborated (albeit very, very weakly) the defense claim that the evidence was planted.
Sure, but we aren't far away from a world where deepfakes are consumer off-the-shelf tech. Hearsay is probably the better historical parallel: we don't allow people to just say "Oh, X said he did it" outside of very specific exceptions, because it's too easy to fake. Photo and video evidence isn't far away from ending up in the same place, where it will be trivially easy to fake. Will that work in 100% of cases? No. But I'm curious how security companies are thinking about how to preserve the usefulness of their product.
But that would still be a world in which 99.99% of videos are real. Someone could, of course, deep fake a liquor store's video in order to falsely implicate someone in a robbery, but unless there is evidence that someone had a motive to do so, why would they? And the analogy to hearsay doesn't really work, because hearsay is excluded not simply because it is too easy to fake, but rather because the original declarant is not subject to cross-examination, and so there is no way to examine the reliability of his statement. Indeed, the fact that I can lie on the stand about what you said (i.e., it is easy for me to fake the evidence of your statement) is irrelevant to the hearsay exclusion, because I am subject to cross-examination re whether I have faked the evidence. After all, if I testify, a) "Joe said that he robbed the bank" and b) "Joe said that thought the dead guy was sleeping with his wife." neither claim is inherently more or less likely to be a fabrication by me. But #a is admissible as an exception to the hearsay rule (or IIRC, not hearsay at all under the federal rules), but #b is not.
Regardless, there is an interesting (and refreshingly brief, for a law review article) discussion of the issue here which you might find interesting; the author argues for raising the standard for admissibility of such evidence.
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Notes -
I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
The mere possibility that it is possible to fabricate evidence does not usually create reasonable doubt. After all, it is possible to fabricate all sorts of evidence, from testimony to physical evidence. Of course you never know what a jury will say, but you would generally need at least some evidence that the evidence was fabricated. That's why evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of racial epithets was admissible in the OJ Simpson trial: it corroborated (albeit very, very weakly) the defense claim that the evidence was planted.
Sure, but we aren't far away from a world where deepfakes are consumer off-the-shelf tech. Hearsay is probably the better historical parallel: we don't allow people to just say "Oh, X said he did it" outside of very specific exceptions, because it's too easy to fake. Photo and video evidence isn't far away from ending up in the same place, where it will be trivially easy to fake. Will that work in 100% of cases? No. But I'm curious how security companies are thinking about how to preserve the usefulness of their product.
But that would still be a world in which 99.99% of videos are real. Someone could, of course, deep fake a liquor store's video in order to falsely implicate someone in a robbery, but unless there is evidence that someone had a motive to do so, why would they? And the analogy to hearsay doesn't really work, because hearsay is excluded not simply because it is too easy to fake, but rather because the original declarant is not subject to cross-examination, and so there is no way to examine the reliability of his statement. Indeed, the fact that I can lie on the stand about what you said (i.e., it is easy for me to fake the evidence of your statement) is irrelevant to the hearsay exclusion, because I am subject to cross-examination re whether I have faked the evidence. After all, if I testify, a) "Joe said that he robbed the bank" and b) "Joe said that thought the dead guy was sleeping with his wife." neither claim is inherently more or less likely to be a fabrication by me. But #a is admissible as an exception to the hearsay rule (or IIRC, not hearsay at all under the federal rules), but #b is not.
Regardless, there is an interesting (and refreshingly brief, for a law review article) discussion of the issue here which you might find interesting; the author argues for raising the standard for admissibility of such evidence.
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