I had a call this morning from a mystery number, with a voice purporting to be “Sarah Wilson from the Housing Repair Team”. It was obviously a bot, and as always a simple tangential question throws the limited and archaic technology they are deploying (e.g. ask a question like “What’s 1+1?” and listen to the gears grinding as it struggles to reroute.
Three thoughts occur to me though.
Firstly, much like the Nigerian Prince email scam, this call wasn’t really meant to fool me, just to cycle through enough phone numbers to find a victim who doesn’t realise and plays along. Unfortunately, given the house repair target area, I’m guessing it is probably one targeting the elderly.
Secondly, how long do older technology set-ups persist in the scam economy? Does the cost of creating something new outweigh the recycling of running an older scam just one more time?
And thirdly, what does the future look like if Generative AI technology becomes cost effective enough to let a “Sarah” answer my “1+1” question more effectively? How should companies releasing these technologies into the be held to account?
Or is that a hard question to answer when one of the central use cases of your technology is “crime”?
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