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“Have you ever read anything by William Gibson, Ms. Saad?” Christian wants to know.
Yasira shakes her head and wonders whether she should take his use of the formal address as a sign of respect or an insult.
“Science fiction author. Wrote a novel calledNeuromancerin the ’80s. It’s the first time the word cyberspace appears.”
Yasira is gradually losing patience. Apparently it shows on her face, because Cyber-Chris speaks a bit faster.
“Anyway, Gibson is supposed to have said:‘The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.’What he means is that...
“I got it,” says Yasira. “What Joe Blow has access to today, or believes to be the pinnacle of technological development, is in fact long outdated.”
“Siri and Alexa are idiots compared to what’s technically possible already.”
That Siri is an idiot is something Yasira can confirm.
“Why?” she asks. “Why aren’t these better versions on the market?”
“Safety, probably. You see, a Tesla, for example, could already drive you from A to B autonomously. The developers just don’t want to commit to guaranteeing that it won’t have an accident. And you should bear in mind that if somebody has an accident, it’s usually not even worth reporting in the local newspaper. But if a self-driving car crashes, it makes headlines around the world.”
“I see.”
“Google, for example, certainly has much more advanced versions of AI than the ones they use for their products, but Larry and Sergey, the founders, are arguing about the course.” Yasira is briefly surprised that Cyber-Chris calls her Ms. Saad, but considers himself on a first-name basis with the founders of Google. “Sergey wantssafeguards. He sees the dangers of AI. Larry, on the other hand, supposedly told Elon Musk once that he wouldn’t mind if machines were smarter than we are some day and would replace humanity as the dominant species. It’s just the next level of evolution.”
“Don’t you find it disgusting that people like that are making decisions about our future?” asks Yasira.
“Sure, I do. But back to the point: even with ChatGPT, OpenAI only releases a predecessor version of the current state to the public. And it’s still heavily strapped so that it doesn’t screw up too badly. Years ago, Microsoft jumped the gun with a chatbot called Tay. A tool with which users could communicate and which learned from these conversations. The result was that Tay was only online for sixteen hours. Microsoft had to shut down its chatbot because by the end of the day it started denying the Holocaust. That surely taught everyone an embarrassing lesson.”
“You know what case I’m working on, Chris?” asks Yasira, deliberately using his first name.
Christian nods. “My department unlocked Lena’s iPhone for you.”
Yasira nods and waits for Christian to continue, but he remains silent.
“And?” she finally asks.
Christian squirms. “Have you ever heard of the conspiracy myth that the Americans were never actually on the moon? That the pictures of the landing and from space were taken in a studio?”
“Sure. But that’s nonsense.”
“Of course it’s nonsense. The interesting point, though, is that I once read somewhere, or maybe it was in the bonus material on a DVD, it doesn’t matter, but in any case one of the arguments used against the moon conspiracy is that with the technical possibilities of 1969 it was actually easier to shoot a man to the moon and record the images there than to convincingly fake them with visual effects.” Christian pauses for emphasis. He should have been a teacher. “That’s certainly no longer the case today.”
“Meaning?” Yasira asks.
“Anything is possible.”
“It could be a fake?”
Christian Baumann shrugs his shoulders. “Why not? But then it’s damn well done. As far as I know, it doesn’t have any glitches. Someone would definitely have spotted them by now.”
“Glitches?”
“Image errors.”
“And we would have discovered them?” asks Yasira.
“Well, not necessarily us. The BKA doesn’t automatically check such videos or anything. So once again, we’re a bit behind the times. But half the internet has watched the video.”
“If it hadglitches, someone would have noticed.”
