Embarrassing Creepy Tech

There are three stories in BBC News coverage today that made me cringe.  They were all discussing an area of technology that has passed me by - sex dolls.  In the first story the Paris council is trying to decide if operating a sex doll rental agency is the same thing as operating a brothel. [They finally decided it was not]  The other two are about two other countries, China and the U.S. that have allowed companies to get to the deployment stage with life-like facsimiles of women.  The Chinese withdrew theirs after two days of operation.  The U.S. story had pictures, and this was the first time I had ever seen one of these dolls.  Much to my surprise, they were a lot more realistic than I would have guessed a lab could produce.  They are not Blade Runner quality, but much better than we could imagine given the robots that are currently for sale.

Maybe we are much closer to a robot that looks and acts human than anyone could have guessed.  That was always the domain of science fiction.   Speech synthesis is getting better all the time, though we can still tell we are talking to a machine that answers the phone and asks for the serial number of my computer.  But it is getting better, and in labs even better still.  I can make a conversation between two people by good synthesis, but an analyzer can tell it is artificial.  The human ear may not be that good.  Imagine political officials talking before an election and the “transcript” posted in the New York Times.  After the fact, we could analyze the whole thing and say it was a fake, but it would be too late for the election.  We could always hope the New York Times validated the “recording” before they published anything.

This is an area that suddenly got creepy.  Aside from my wife saying, “Why are you reading articles about sex dolls”, the whole area is open to a wide variety of ways someone could pretend to be me.  We once got in a lot of trouble by photoshopping an image of my boss shaking hands with the Russian leader.  It was a little too realistic for his liking.  But Facebook friends have turned out to be Russian bots, and Twitter feeds are fake news generated in foreign intelligence service.  They used real names of real people to pretend to be them.  In the context of artificial intelligence that has to be creepy.  Somebody can create a narrative about me and use my statements to support that narrative.  I didn’t make those statements, but have a hard time with denial when:  there they are, in print.  The creation of a dossier of facts is just the beginning of a much more insidious form of artificial life.