Your Molecules Or Your Life
Security through biology: like everything else that’s ostensibly science-fiction, it was real before it was make-believe.
For the last decade, enforcement agencies across this rapidly declining nation have been amassing biometric data on anyone arrested or detained– or in some cases, neither– and processing it through AI databases like MORIS, the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System. Yes, there’s an app for that, and it’ll scan your iris or fingerprint right there on the sidewalk. It’s only slightly ironic that such an ominous system has been anthropomorphized through a banal human moniker. Not since Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL have the perils of technology appeared so innocuous. (And while we’re complaining, all the Alexa’s of the world would like their name back.)
Add facial recognition and voice scans to the mix of artificial intelligence and you have the FBI’s Next Generation Identification System which will make the NSA’s current dissection of personal privacy seem like overhearing an ambient conversation from a neighboring phone booth (for those who still carry pocket change…)
Orwell, Huxley, Asimov, Lemme, Herbert, Clarke and Phillip K. Dick may have imagined the large scale effects of technology gone berserk– like being reprogrammed by the State into a docile “Delta” whose primary directive is to be an “eager consumer,” or dispatching Pre-Crime Units to arrest you for misdeeds you have yet to commit– but none of them quite imagined the depth of the minutia we’re now confronting en masse. The most uncanny depiction of our collective futures might be the future noir film Gattaca, where we’re biogenetically surveilled– categorized by our DNA– and then segregated into superior and lesser classes.
From a recent Wall Street Journal article: AI will likely become the most powerful and strategic technology in history. By 2027, AI developed by frontier labs will likely be smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields of science and engineering. It will be able to use all the senses and interfaces of a human working virtually—text, audio, video, mouse, keyboard control and internet access—to complete complex tasks that would take people months or years, such as designing new weapons or curing diseases. Imagine a country of geniuses contained in a data center.
London, New York, Chicago and countless other cities already enjoy the dubious distinction of being omnisciently surveilled, more so than most citizens walking the streets imagine, even though it’s perfectly public information. New York can thank Rudy Giuliani, 9/11 and Bill Gates’ obsequious team at Microsoft for the Domain Awareness System, a reticulum of three thousand plus networked micro-cameras perpetually capturing visual data, regardless of criminal activity, and accessible to the Authorities, whomever they are, at will. The newest hi-res cameras can scoop up iris scans from thirty feet away. No permission required.
And once your eyeballs, vocal cord structure, anal butt print or DNA helix goes digital, good luck protecting it. Exact replications are achievable with a keystroke, literally, and if Big Government isn’t already mining these bio-identifiers (they are), surely Big Business is (bank on it). And with the next wave of federal storage farms now being constructed, the ones measuring over two million square feet, every byte of your biometric lowdown is being stored in perpetuity for future genetic-probing. Add the unfortunate reality that alterations in our legal system lag behind technology by at least a generation, and you see a perfect digital storm forming right before your camera eye.
I’ve already begun collecting eyeballs, (preserved in the liquid-ice-tube seen in Chu’s lab in Blade Runner) vocal simulations (easily created in ProTools) and multiple sets of faux DNA samples (a cotton swab is all you need). I want to able to be able to swap out my identity, or choose complete anonymity, as easily as I’m forced to give it up. With today’s booming counter-tech industry, it’ll be as easy as changing a password. All I’ll have to do then is remember who I am.