Trust is the sine non qua of identity theft.
Imagine your distress that instead of just providing banks with the names of your grade school or your first pet they found on the web, crooks had a way to imitate your voice over the phone to family, friends and co-workers.
Thanks to artificial intelligence they soon, will warns Congressman/physicist Bill Foster, chair of the AI Task Force at the House Financial Services Committee.
By stealing a snippet of your speech from voice mail, thieves will be able to use AI to converse with your personal and business contacts and persuade them to click on virus-laden attachment to emails they might usually be too wary to open, he explained in an interview Tuesday.
The Illinois Democrat wants the task force to look into what the government can do to curb ID theft.
One solution he envisions is a voluntary something on your cellphone that would only give a limited amount of information, such as telling a hotel how it could legally go after you if you fail to pay your bill.
The Congressman said he sees this is an approach that could appease opponents on the right and the left of a national ID card.
.Looking at AI now, Foster said it is aiding consumers in detecting fraudulent transactions made by crooks who’ve stolen credit cards and helping you search for products online.
For example, you might tell Amazon you’re looking for a tie. Amazon knows you like Frank Lloyd Wright so it will show you ties with prints of the architect’s designs.
In five years, Foster said AI will become sophisticated enough to enable banks will be to conduct business with you over the phone with a synthetized voice such as answering questions you have about your bank account.
In five to 10 years, businesses will be able to protect against cyber breaches using AI instead of humans.
“We’re already very close,” said Foster.
Just as technology helped spawn the last recession (think of the sliced and diced bundles of mortgage backed securities from the labs of M.I.T. PhDs, the Congressman said he is worried AI could lead to the next collapse.
He said his concern is over the next decade big banks and big tech will merge.
All big bank CEOs are turning their holding companies into tech firms and all tech firms are becoming bank like, said Foster.
He noted millions of companies are doing business with Amazon which is providing them with inventory lines of credit.
With both manufacturers and consumers, the company is bypassing the banking system.
“If a massive cyber break shuts down Amazon, it would have a major impact on our economy. At that point Amazon would be too big to fail,” said the House AI Task Force Chair.
When told FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams has contended artificial intelligence and machine learning will provide
better opportunities to manage risk, Foster responded it sounds like what was said about structured financial products before the meltdown.
“I can easily imagine instability caused by machines talking to machines,” said Foster.
He added some have argued that is what triggered the May, 2010 flash crash.
Foster said a strong Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be the best line of defense against financial institutions using AI intentionally or unintentionally to deny credit to women and minorities.
But then he backtracked.
“It’s likely a single regulator would drop the ball,” said Foster.
He said AI is likely to be fairer in lending decisions than desk jockeys.
“The average loan officer is a bundle of biases like any other human,” said the Congressman.
Before coming to Congress, Foster spent 22 years starting in 1984 as a physicist at Fermilab, the second largest complex in the world that smashes particles smaller than atoms to uncover the building blocks of matter and energy.
He noted the typical cell phone has more computing power than all of Fermilab did in the 1990s.
With that cyber engine, Foster said it won’t be very long before AI is in your pocket.
