Tech billionaire Jack Dorsey, best known as the founder of Twitter (now X), has issued a stark warning about the future. He predicts that in the next five to ten years, it will become increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between reality and fabrication. "Don't trust; verify," he advised.
Dorsey emphasized the need for personal verification and experience in an era dominated by advanced image creation, deep fakes, and manipulated videos. "You have to experience it yourself. And you have to learn yourself. This is going to be so critical as we enter this time in the next five years or 10 years because of the way that images are created, deep fakes, and videos; you will not, you will literally not know what is real and what is fake," he stated.
He warned that the overwhelming production of artificial content will make it feel like living in a simulation. "It will be almost impossible to tell. It will feel like you're in a simulation. Because everything will look manufactured, everything will look produced. It's very important that you shift your mindset or attempt to shift your mindset to verify the things that you feel you need through your experience and your intuition," he added.
Dorsey also highlighted a concerning trend where devices are replacing functions traditionally performed by the human brain. "Devices in your bags and your pockets are taking over functions traditionally performed by the human brain, and because all these are on your phone now, you're not building those connections in your brain anymore," he warned.
The video of Dorsey's comments was posted on X, prompting a response from Elon Musk, the current owner of the social media site. Musk questioned, “How do we know we aren’t already there?"
In May 2024, Dorsey made headlines for resigning from the board of Bluesky, a social networking service he helped fund and popularize. This decision followed his regret over selling Twitter to Musk.
Dorsey also significantly reduced his list of followed accounts on X to just three: Elon Musk, Edward Snowden, and Stella Assange, wife of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. This move was seen as a sign of improving relations between Dorsey and Musk. Previously, Dorsey had expressed disappointment over Musk’s takeover and drastic changes to Twitter, posting on Bluesky in 2023 that “it all went south" after the acquisition.