When most people think of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), they think of Star Wars style robots or self driving cars and such. The reality is most A.I. is actually software inhabiting the hard drives of computers and fiber optic cables. These include but are not limited to friendly self repairing software programs as well as malicious computer viruses. But what I want to talk about today would be something you could call Siri 2.0 . We're all familiar with the smart phone app Siri, that can recognize your voice and answer your questions; but does so in a robotic voice that anyone can tell is fake. But with the coming of "Artificial Personalities" similar to the O.S. on the Joaquin Phoenix film "Her", their voices will be indistinguishable from that of humans. The implications of this are frightening to say the least. In order to create a realistic artificial voice personality, you would need to record it from a real person to create a vast word library. But if you can record one persons voice, you can also record ANY person's voice ! This would be the ultimate in identity theft. Imagine a hacker tapping into your phone line, recording your voice over the course of a few weeks, and building a word and personality library of you, an "audio avatar" if you will. Hackers could then commandeer this digital clone of yourself, and do all sorts of damage. They could call your bank, pretending to be you and remove money from your account. Book vacations for themselves on your nickel and dime. Or for shit and giggles, prank call your friends and family, without you even knowing about it. Worse yet, hackers could digitally copy the voices of authority figures, like say the police, call your phone and order you to come to the police station, and break into your house while you we're gone. The horrific possibilities of artificial personalities are endless. Let's use caution as we drive pedal to the metal, with new smart phone apps, under the guise of "convenience".
B.D. Seegebarth
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