Today I was reminded of the first post I ever wrote on this blog (Voice AI, Telecom, Scams, and Co-evolution), back in 2018. My first article was focused on second-order effects of emerging voice AI capabilities and projected a number of scams that the technology would enable.
While this tech also has many positives, I always try to get a fuller picture by looking at the system.
The world is full of trade offs. In the case of voice AI in the article, we have the ability to scale up scams that historically worked, but only in small does. The “hey grandma” scam was one example. As I wrote back then:
“An older scam that this tech will scale is what’s known as the “Hey, Grandma” scam, where a grandparent gets a call from a “grandchild” in distress. There are different flavors of this. For US grandparents the story is often that the grandchild got into legal trouble and needs money wired. In China and Taiwan, it’s often that the grandchild has been kidnapped and is being beaten up. Again, wire the money.”