Sex Dolls, Artificial Intelligence, and Homeland Security
What’s the meaning of security when “they” know you better than you know yourself?
A few years ago, Uber got into public relations trouble when they published a blog post describing how they can analyze ridership data to infer certain behaviors on the part of the riders: “One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns…we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10pm and 4am on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4–6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”
This was over two years ago, and you can be sure that Uber knows much more about many more people’s behaviors than they did then. And it’s not just Uber, of course. Amazon’s recent triumph with Alexa, the AI-infused personal assistant, means that Amazon now knows pretty much every single thing that you and your family members do on an everyday basis. If you add this on top of all the shopping, reading, and video-watching data that Amazon has about you, it’s not that difficult to create a strawman for what type of everyday choices you make. But you can’t leave out Facebook, which boasts 1.8 Billion active users around the world who spend an average time of 20 minutes per login. Also, Facebook data thru May 2013 shows that 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared and 300 Million photos are uploaded everyday. It’s no exaggeration when it’s reported that Facebook knows when you are about to make a decision to marry or divorce even before you have consciously become aware of the decision yourself.
But this is all old news already. The next big technological breakthrough seems to be in intelligent robots that can socially engage with human beings in a natural way. Needless to say, the porn industry is all over this, as it was with videotapes, DVD, virtual reality, and Internet video streaming. Whatever your opinion might be, porn has been a leading player in human-technology interface space for a long time.
Granted, there are companies like Realdolls and TrueCompanion that already sell hyper-realistic silicon sex dolls for upwards of $10,000. Now imagine that those dolls are actually robots built on an artificial intelligence engine that can interact with you not merely as a sex toy but as a full-fledged companion in the bedroom.
“Use of artificial intelligence (AI) devices in the bedroom will be socially normal within 25 years.” This is what participants heard in last December’s International Congress of Love and Sex with Robotics (yes, there is such a thing already). Moreover, Kate Devlin, computing expert at Goldsmiths, University of London, said it was probable future sex robots would be designed to learn their human partners’ sexual preferences to improve performance. ‘Companion’ devices such as the Pepper robot are being increasingly used to provide stimulation to elderly people, particularly in Asian countries like Japan. Created two years ago, the humanoid robot is designed with the ability to read certain emotions from analyzing expressions and voice tones.”
What’s happening here is that all these seemingly disparate companies from Amazon, Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, Uber, and even Tesla are essentially Big Data companies that happen to sell services or products that act as data collection platforms. And the data they are collecting are behavioral data on you. When all the data around your everyday interactions with these services is aggregated, it will be a more accurate representation of you than your own idea of who you think you are. Add to that the possibility that you will now have intimate companions that don’t really even have to be sex dolls, (personal assistants like Alexa are intimate enough) who can collect, analyze, and map your behavioral data to your cognitive and emotional data. In short, this is the digital you, even to your most private behaviors. And it can all be reproduced digitally (by some company) to look, act, sound, have sex, and even make decisions like you.
At this point, this is no longer a matter of securing your privacy. It’s securing your self-identity. Are you the digital you that these companies have created based on your actual everyday behavior? Or are you that person you always thought you were? Worse, who owns and controls your digital self?
Needless to say, the security implications are enormous. How do you secure yourself against your own digital self that you no longer own? When your digital self commits a crime, who’s at fault? When your child’s digital self cyber-hijacks an autonomous truck and drives it into a crowd of partygoers in Nice, who’s the terrorist? How do you even protect your children in this new environment? They will be exposed as soon as they are born and monitored by connected medical devices and watched over by cameras.
When a human being can be reduced (and reproduced) into a walking set of behavioral data by a collection of third-party companies or rogue actors what does that mean for hometown security?
And you can be assured that this won’t be a one-way communication. If they know you better than you know yourself, don’t you think they can make “suggestions” that will drive your behavior? They won’t just be passive collector of data. They will be active participants (or even influencers) of your choices and behaviors. Can these “suggestions” include terrorism and crimes? Who’s in charge now?
Just a few years ago, these questions were the stuff of science fiction and existential philosophers. No longer. Soon, these will be the stuff of your local police, firefighters, first responders, and other homeland security professionals. Welcome to the 21st century.
