Serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who runs X, Tesla, xAI and several other innovative companies, has taken to his own social media platform, X (formerly famous as Twitter), to warn the global community about the clear possibility of the “Black Mirror” TV series coming true in real life soon.
Musk’s warning was about a new AI product announced by Microsoft – the patron of OpenAI, which Musk sued earlier this year.
Yuri MolchanElon Musk's "Black Mirror" warning
Elon Musk has commented on the new AI feature presented by Microsoft. It is called “Recall.” This addition to the Windows operating system will constantly take screenshots of users’ computers to let them remember and quickly access everything they had on their computers later, as in an archive.
Musk pointed out that this sounds like an episode from the TV series "Black Mirror", created to show to wide TV audiences possible dystopian scenarios of how technologies in the future may be used for controlling and ruling the global population.
Musk tweeted that he will definitely turn this Microsoft feature off.
New Microsoft "Recall" feature described by CEO Nadella
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that Recall is a way to introduce photographic memories into users’ history. They will be able to do a semantic search in it if they want to recall what they did on their PCs at a certain previous point, on a certain day, in a particular month, year, etc,, to “recreate moments from the past.” Then all this data will be processed by AI to make it searchable.
Musk saw another point here, though. The tech magnate perhaps implied that this data with screenshots can be easily accessed and used to control users’ actions and to see exactly what web pages they visited, to have a peek into their personal files, photos, correspondence and everything else. In conditions of strengthening authoritarian regimes around the world, this could become a perfect tool for controlling the population through constant surveillance of their PCs.
Satya Nadella assures that this will only be done locally on users’ PCs, and that those who believe this feature could be dangerous and privacy-interfering have nothing to worry about.
Denys Serhiichuk
Valeria Blokhina
Gamza Khanzadaev
