Technology is advancing at a pace that we never thought possible just a mere ten years ago, especially in the area of artificial intelligence. Indeed, AI development has advanced more in the past mere 10 years than was ever thought possible prior to that, achieving feats that nobody thought possible, at least not this fast.
Some people have pondered if there's an actual danger in all this technology. Sure, technology helps humanity a great deal in many ways, but there can also be a downside to it. There may be dangers to it.
For example, technology has already advanced pretty much to the point where it's possible to create so-called "deep fakes", in other words, fake videos and voice recordings of people that are so convincing that they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. While there may still be some techniques and technologies to distinguish between fake AI-created footage and real footage, this gap is being closed very fast, and we may well very soon exist in a world where you simply cannot trust any video or audio footage, because it could well be a complete fabrication, but so well made that it's literally impossible to tell if it is.
Others have pondered if advances in artificial intelligence could pose some other dangers to humanity. After all, self-learning neural networks "learn" to do things that aren't explicitly programmed into them, and thus we don't really control what they "learn", and if something goes wrong, it's extraordinarily difficult and laborious to pinpoint the exact reason why it went wrong. The exact node with the exact weight, or combination of them, that caused the problem, and why it caused it. Neural networks are generated automatically and are not created by humans, and thus could in some situations go very wrong.
But anyway, none of those are the actual biggest immediate threats of advancing technology. Do you know what is? The fact that they make doxing of people easier and easier by the month. That's what.
I don't think many people have realized that danger.
Doxing (finding out who someone on the internet actually is, and publishing his real life information so that he can be harassed, his employees and family harassed, and even perhaps attacked in real life) has become more and more of a weapon for political persecution in the modern world.
The danger of this is that the easier it is to dox someone, the more people will start doing it, and for the flimsiest and pettiest of reasons. Don't like what someone said? Don't like the opinion that someone expressed? Just click a button and that person is now doxed, all of his information is on the public, perhaps even a massive smearing campaign is automatically started, and now that person's life will be completely ruined and, in the worst cases, even his very life my be in danger because of violent attacks.
Technology is already quite far advanced in that direction. There are already online services where you can upload someone's photograph, and the AI will search the internet for photographs of the same person (not just the same photograph, but any other photographs where the same person seems to be part of.) With just one single photograph of the person, you now have almost all photographs of that person that exist online, and these can be used to trace who that person is.
It's only a matter of time before finding out personal details about someone is automatized. Suddenly you could, at the click of a button, know the person's home address, telephone number, employee information... everything you need to dox that person.
Technology is quickly going in that direction, and it will be used for political persecution of people, to intimidate them, to ruin their lives, to threaten them, even to physically attack them to the point of putting their very lives in danger.
That is the immediate biggest danger of advancing technology at this moment.
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