Will AI steal our memories and will we care?
Artificial Intelligence presents an interesting dilemma these days, for every good thing proponents say about the technology there are another 5 things that are perceived as bad or dangerous.
Linking AI to the human brain is a good example. Many people hail the benefits of being integrated with technology. For example, the disabled could be able to manipulate services and machines from their mind. Thus freeing them to achieve the things that they desire.
This is laudable and would be a fantastic use of technology. However, the use of AI for purely altruistic purposes is likely to be short lived in the current climate. Research is already taking place on enabling us to read the thoughts of others. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to foresee a world where your very thoughts would be open to public consumption.
Potential arrestees could have their minds read routinely, by a State Government that we would need to trust to be benign. Perhaps our thoughts could be stolen in the same way that contactless technology is sometimes used to steal money from our bank accounts without knowledge.
Maybe our memories would be routinely accessed in the same way that our face is scanned and retained permanently by facial recognition cameras. For AI to assess and pre-determine your actions based on algorithms.
Would it become possible to be ‘locked up’ for our very thoughts and our memories forcibly taken from us – and would society care if the short term benefits seem good enough?
Will AI steal our memories and will we care?
We see a society that judges that facial recognition and data mining of our actions is permissible in all circumstances; and that we can live stream our world on the move. (Thus ignoring the privacy concerns of those being recorded without their consent, on the basis that the person recording can have a better more enriched enjoyment of the world). Then we know that a time when your thoughts are being monitored, and your memories viewed (for society’s safety or enrichment), is only delayed for as long as it takes for the technology to be cheaply available and easy to use.
When this happens, we will know that freedom has truly died and humanity has become truly enslaved.
