Uh, Did Google Fake Its Big AI Demo?

When Axios reached out for comment to verify that the businesses existed, and that the calls weren’t set up in advance, a executive declined to provide names of the establishments; when Axios asked if the calls were edited Google executive also declined to comment. The company did not immediately respond to a series of questions which were asked from the Hive.

Of course, it’s entirely possible Google has successfully made a lifelike virtual assistant that can replicate interactions among the users over the phone, and it’s possible we’ll all be using and interacting with this kind of Artificial Intelligence sooner than we might like. The snippets of conversation during Google CEo Sundar demo, which can be heard from the clip, seem too polished and unrealistic to be real. But advancements in artificial intelligence are also growing rapidly and quickly.

Tesla and Uber are working on developing the self-driving cars and is also soon going to launch it. Amazon is replacing human cashiers with A.I. in its automated grocery and general stores. Facing is mining your personal data to predict your future actions for advertisers. And the technological arms race is just beginning. Global spending on artificial intelligence and machine learning is predicted to grow from $12 billion in the year 2017 to $57.6 billion by the year 2021, and venture capital investments in A.I. companies is skyrocketing.

Voice enables devices like Google Assistant can be hijacked by bad actors, as a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, recently demonstrated by using audio commands undetectable to the human ear—hidden in a YouTube video—to hijack Amazon’s Alexa and order it to make purchases. In a world where almost all consumer appliances—televisions, refrigerators, light switches, cars, door locks—will soon be WiFi-enabled, the capacity for these A.I.s to be manipulated—or to go rogue—is a terrifying prospect.