Just got … at 6.30 AM ! … an AI phone call claiming that “your business listing is in serious trouble, people will NOT be able to find you. please call back at nnnnnn to fix this. it will only take a minute. Please call back at nnnnnn, it will only take a minute.”
(Like repetition is going to put me into hypnosis and make me do it? )
Fortunately, I don’t answer phone calls at that unseemly hour, so it was the answering machine (yes, old-fashioned ordinary answering machine) and I listened to this nonsense, without giving “them” anything to chew on.
I didn’t hear who the call was claiming to be from… and unfortunately it doesn’t matter! There was absolutely no way to tell who was really calling, what business sicked this software on me. So some piece of idiot software calls me up and issues dire warnings and threats and politely asks me to call back at once? And this works? (Yeah, I’m afraid that it will indeed work on way too many of you.)
What good is caller id anymore? It’s become worthless as a security measure. They can fake the number a call is coming from, they can verbally claim to be anybody, and that makes caller ID meaningless.
Then there was that other call I got a week or so ago: “hello?” 1 sec pause. “Hello?” 1 sec pause. “Hello, please respond” at which point I simply hung up. Obviously an AI that wanted to chat about the weather or the Mets, right?
Here’s my Big Fear on this stuff (as if the above isn’t bad enough, right?) Can they add some under-tone that induces “obedience” in these things? Hypnotic tech, I mean. Subliminals. It’s a recording (generated in the moment, but a recording, effectively), after all, and too much work has been done on embedding crowd-control signals and subliminals into PA systems, music systems and the like. Phones have limited audio bandwidth, fortunately, so they can’t get the subsonics on the call that would can actually induce panic in most people, but there are other signals they can generate, equivalent to “sub-vocalizations” or even backwards speech embedded in the call. (Backwards speech is a real phenomenon [look it up], and that the Human mind can do it at all, means that the Human mind can also hear it… dang it.)
AI is going to be trouble. In fact, it already is.
I wish the legislators had at least tried to put the djinn back in the bottle instead of just jumping on the profits bandwagon. I foresee rough seas ahead.
By the way, how many scammer-jobs have been lost already to this? And do scammer-phone-center layoffs even get reported? I mean, if Al Capone had to lay off staff would he have reported that? Probably not, but here’s a serious arena where AI is already cutting employment short. Piffle…
I hear doctors (GPs in particular) are in danger of being replaced with an AI that does the prescriptions and the referrals. Oh, gee, I can’t tell you how that idea fills me with confidence…
We are simply not ready for this. Even those taking advantage of AI right now, and making more profits than ever (one assumes) have no idea what they are doing and what a tiger they have by the tail. It will bite us all, the only question is how badly?
I mean, what happens when you manage to automate not just the daily tasks we used to pay real people to do, but when you also automate human greed?
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