Today’s concerns about giving up privacy will seem quaint in the coming years. A.I. will need everything, and we’ll happily give it. The artificial intelligence revolution is clearly happening. And it’s super exciting. A.I. will transform medicine, give us all super-smart virtual assistants, fight crime and a thousand things more. But there’s a catch. In order for A.I. to work its miracles, it’s going to need data. Massive amounts of data. And I’m predicting that we’ll willingly give that data. In fact, we’re already starting to.

Do you use Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa? They work by recording your voice, uploading the recording to the cloud, then processing the words and sending back the answer. After you’ve got your answer, you forget about the query. But your recorded voice, the text extracted from it, and the entire context of the back-and-forth conversations you had are still doing work in the service of the A.I. that makes virtual assistants work. Everything you say to your virtual assistant is funneled into the data-crunching A.I. engines and retained for analysis. READ MORE


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