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Hey, Siri, turn off Skynet

From the Top of the Pile
Brian Zinchuk

A Facebook post got me thinking. The top part noted that in the 1960s, people were worried about the government wiretapping their phones. The lower part shows a woman speaking to her Amazon Alexa, a wiretap she purposely put in her home, asking it for pancake recipes.

My wife pointed out that my phone informed me our vehicle was parked. I know, I told her. It also tells me when you park at work, too. And when I leave the house, it says how long it will take me to get to the office. When I start the truck at the end of the day, it tells me how long it will take to get home, too.

My iPhone has a built-in fingerprint scanner, which I have never used, nor do I intend to. However, I am certain it has already scanned my fingerprint ever time I touch it, and thus big brother, somewhere, has both of my index fingers scanned.

This is somewhat significant in that I have never had my fingerprints taken, for any purpose. About 14 years ago I got a new-fangled wireless mouse whose receiver included a fingerprint scanner. To hell with that, I thought, and never used the scanner.

The new iPhone X, in getting rid of its fingerprint scanner, now uses its front-facing camera, plus special thermal cameras, to do a visual identification on your face before opening your phone. Great way to keep the kids from absconding with it, horrible for any notion of personal privacy.

And now Wired is reporting that a Vietnamese security firm has figured out how to crack it, using a 3-D printed mask made of plastic, silicone, makeup and paper cutouts. Their hack has yet to be verified, but if true, Face ID isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I must grant here that most people do not have it in their capabilities to, Mission Impossible-like, come up with realistic masks of this type. So I wouldn’t worry too much about that. It’s just freaky how biometrics is now becoming standard.

South Park, the ultimate in irreverent television, spoofed the Amazon Alexa in September, purposefully causing the Alexa to add several rather rude things to its shopping list and even telling it good night, to which the real life Alexa in people’s homes wished the TV sweet dreams.

Our homes and pockets are now filled with devices listening around the clock for “Hey, Siri,” or “Okay, Google.”

How much data has to be flowing out of all these devices, all the time? How much computer processing power is being used to handle all of this?

You can take it as a given that your phone conversations, emails, texts and chats are being monitored by some big brother computer system, somewhere, watching for keywords. Imagine if that processing power was used to map the genomes of various forms of cancer? Instead, it’s being used in the most part to sell ads.

Thinking back to the Terminator movie franchise, it’s scary how prescient they have turned out to be. Indeed, the next generation of stealth bombers, the B-21 Raider, is to be capable of manned and unmanned operations, I read this week. .

To quote the Terminator from 1991’s Terminator 2, “In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.”

Well, they got the date wrong, which is addressed in this movie and the latter ones. But the warnings about artificial intelligence are spooky.

What if Google and Facebook get together and have an AI baby? Then they take over Lockheed Martin, Northrum Grumman and Boeing?

Hey, only the likes of Stephen Hawking, arguably the smartest person on the planet, and Elon Musk, the guy behind Tesla and SpaceX, are warning about artificial intelligence.

What if FaceGoogleLockheedBook, a.k.a. Skynet, determines we’re more trouble than we’re worth?

How do we pull the plug then?

“Hey, Siri, turn off Skynet,” is not going to cut it.

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net