The need for multiple identities
I think one of the potentially alarming aspects of AI is the ability for it to do research on specific people. In the past it was fairly easy to keep your work and personal lives separate, but it’s increasingly hard to do that because both are online. There are aspects of your personal life that you may not want your employer or clients knowing about — you may not want your employer to know about your political views, your sexuality, your activism, what you get up to at the weekends, but it will hard to do that. I have long thought that we should be able to have two names/identities — a work name/identity, and a personal one. Indeed this is common in the entertainment industries, where the separation of public and personal lives has been an issue for longer.
These thoughts were partly provoked by me discovering this — it’s fairly harmless as it just does an entertaining summary looking at a single site. This is generated from posts I have personally made to the Hacker News site: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/james-bcn
But of course this kind of thing could be done for all available online information about someone, which is a huge amount, even for people who don’t post much. (I don’t think most people realize how much information can be gleaned about someone from single photographs, for example).
When you apply for a job in the near future, your potential employer is likely to have an AI generated summary of your whole life, including what you get up to at the weekends…