Take two minutes out of your day to watch this video.
Then go and check the level of provisions in your apocalyptic bomb shelter.
What do you mean you don’t have one? Well how else will you survive in the post-human era?
I must admit I was floored by this video, AI capable of duping real humans was (I expected) still some years away.
Having to fear for your life is probably some way off, but let’s go all Black Mirror and take a look at one possible progression of this technology.
Identity theft
Imagine this scenario:
- Hundreds of hours of your recorded phone conversations are sold by an unscrupulous phone provider to a third party for a profit.
- Third party redistributes information (or is hacked).
- Hackers train a bot to mimic your mannerisms, tone of voice etc based on this information.
- Bot is used to impersonate you to extract any possible financial information from friends and family.
- Hackers drain their accounts, you get the blame.
Think about this, a world where we could no longer trust a voice on the end of the phone. How would communication evolve to combat this threat?
Increasingly we are living in a world where our private information is a commodity to be monetised. What’s worse is most of this voluntary, we give up our information for the sake of increased convenience. We are self selecting ourselves into our own version of the matrix.
Now that’s very dystopian and I promise I’m not a conspiracy nut, but an eventuality like that would start with small steps like this.
This technology was made to save us the hassle of booking our own restaurants and haircuts, but AI has massive potential repercussions, is this all worth it?
What are your concerns about rapidly advancing AI technology? On the flip side, what benefits are you looking forward to?
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.