Virtually on-line

Suppose you wanted to take a complete vacation from being on-line, but you didn’t want people to know it. Say, for example, you wanted to sneak off for a week in the desert, away from all forms of electronic communication, just communing with nature.

Let’s say you were running an A.I. that could simulate your responses — on the order of “I’ll need to get back to you soon on that.” Something that would suggest that you had read people’s email/text/whatever, but not that you were off the grid.

How long could you get away with it, before people started to catch on?

3 thoughts on “Virtually on-line”

  1. I’m afraid at the moment I can’t give you a definitive answer, but I’ll get back to you soon on that.
    😉

  2. A sound engineer I met years ago created an audio app that would pick up a phone call, greet the caller with, “Hello”, and then start listening for breaks in the conversation and filling them with random innocuous responses; “uh huh”, “yeah”, “ok, sure”, etc.

    If it detected it was getting caught (IIRC by checking for rising volume on the caller’s end) the bot abruptly cut in with “Oh, hey, sorry gotta go now!” and hung up.

    The developer had some pretty funny (but possibly staged?) recordings of the bot in action.

    I’m also reminded of Microsoft’s “Tay” experiment trying the same thing in social media, but that quickly went off the rails.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *