As a schizotypal person, I'm unsure how more people aren't exhibiting paranoid schizophrenic symptoms in this wildly untrustworthy digital age.

Yesterday a good friend reached out to me on a new phone number to wish me happy holidays, she shortly afterwards asked me to donate to a fund to help her sick cat.

Even though this person had a similar typing style, the unrecognized phone number made me feel paranoid that it may be an LLM attempting to get money from me in an automated scam, so I made the choice to call my friend to get more evidence via voice.

It turned out to be my friend(or an even more elaborate ruse using voice capture and mass data-mining tech, but that seemed extremely unlikely, at least for another couple years).

My brother had full on shizpphrenia, and would often call family members asking them to provide evidence that they are who they say they are and not government robots. It was an obvious delusion when he was alive, but now that we're in a world where that sort of evidence-gathering is no longer extreme, paranoia is the new normal.

Our usual safeguards of identity are breaking down, and you can bet that large corporations with an eye on the coin are going to swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.

Society, in a sense, is highly dependent on trustworthy interactions. Credit, ownership transfers, banking, etc. all depend on trust. If we go back to only being able to trust in-person interactions, we'll be stepping back to a financial system from over 100 years ago.

Because of this, I believe that solutions will be developed. Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the government depends on a solution being found.