“You look just like…” “Yeah. I know. I have dopplegangers out there.” – real world conversation

Look-alikes happen. Family, or even strangers who look just like us. Apologies and congratulations as appropriate. Confuse reigns. Shakespeare and sitcoms rely on them. I was thinking about doppelgangers, too; but, it was because of an AI help desk. Change happens. Time to get ready for yet another change.

As if voice mail menues weren’t frustrating enough. Press 1. Press 2. But they may not tell you which number to press to actually get an answer. Calling Help does not always deliver help. It can, however, inspire sales of headache medicine. Add AI.

AI is no longer some future addition to our lives. AI has actually been around for a longer time than most people realize, but now they sound more real. It is easier to start a conversation thinking there is a person on the other end. That emotional response or soothing voice might be a person, but it can also be an AI. (One hint that it is a person is if they sound honestly frustrated by yet another caller at the end of a long day. Computers start fresh with each conversation.)

My question was definitely in the Other category, something they had no number for. I found an answer by hanging up on the company and purposely calling a local firm with real people, real knowledge about the area, and some honest and perfectly imperfect things to say. 

AI has the potential to become smarter than any of us. It is tireless. It can continually improve. It can become so good that its flaws shrink to insignificance. I think that perfection actually opens a business opportunity. Be real. Be human. Be imperfect.

Computers can make mistakes and be imperfect, but for a long time it was been possible to notice an artificial voice or response. Infinite loops happen. Press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – and 5 leads you back to Press 1. 

People are easier to break out of such loops, even bureacratic ones because they have limits. Eventually, they’ll try a different approach or pass the call to someone else. 

I mentioned this to someone else, and they pointed out that video calls could solve the problem. Calling familiar people can, too. A new niche for Zoom.

And then I reminded myself of some of the articles chronicling AI’s recent progress. One AI can generate text. Another can turn that into credible speech. Another can generate a video of a person. That Zoom call may just be a bot, a very fancy bot.

An AI package of all of those capabilities could be a boon to some programmer. Feed the AIs your own image, train it on your voice, train it on the way you write and things you say. Voila! You can have your own personal AI-bot that can attend multiple meetings at once, take notes, say a few innocuous things, and give you time to do whatever you were going to do. Nap? Tend the kids, the pets, the house, dinner? You’d still have to attend meetings where you matter, but it would be one way to buy back that time spent in meetings where you’re just part of the audience. Imagine a boss who holds a meeting, and everyone who shows up is digital.

Of course, if you can have your own personal AI-bot, then someone else can make one of you, too. There will be some security measures, particularly for financial transactions; but as long as the interaction is digital we may find we have doppelgangers that we didn’t approve of. Skip the money issues. Reputations can be ruined. Deep-fakes have been around for years; but, these fakes could be autonomous. Gossip gets out of control. Trust diminshes. A lot of time and energy wasted at rectifying the damage. Someone upset with you could send a doppelganger of you out to do dastardly deeds. 

Ironically, AI and doppelgangers may drive us back together to meet in person. If anything digital has at least some diminished trustworthiness, it may make more people meet. Coffeeshops, conference centers, even socializing may come back in style. Where did you hear that rumor? If it was online it might not be true. If it was in-person it still might not be true, but at least there will be other clues like body language or the reactions from others in the room.

Advances create ironies. 

AI is out of the box. It will grow so large so fast that it will never fit back inside it. Rhetoric about containing it is like trying to convince dandelion seeds to go against the wind and become a flower, again. 

Doppelgangers have been in sci-fi for a long time. Frequently, the story entails a doppelganger that succeeds on its own, regardless of the original. Does it get the money from an invention, or must it give all benefits back to some entity that did none of the work? Do we have two separate worlds: organic versus digital; or does the digital become permanently subordinate to the organic; or does the digital gain enough power to begin taking over? Issues of slavery and rights become key, especially if doppelgangers develop autonomy.

Why write about this on a personal finance blog? As these capabilities become available, they are being incorporated into business practices. Help desks are easy to encounter, but large swathes of occupations are at risk. As businesses and jobs change, personal finances change.

Most entrepreneurs I hear about who are pursuing new ideas are pushing into that digital frontier. Gold rushes happen. People laughed at Amazon. (Ha! Sell books online? Silly notion.) Someone is starting the equivalent now. Good luck guessing at which one that is.

I will be looking for investments at the other end. What business model is going to serve a possible return to people communicating with people? Starbucks already has The Third Place. How about a Third Place that doesn’t include the hiss of an espresso machine, or the obnoxious grind of ice being chipped for some cold drink? Do libaries witness a resurgence? Businesses may still prefer online calls because of the cost of travel, yet maintain some travel for critical negotiations. But what other businesses are out there? They may be reprises from decades ago. I am sure that someone is going to find some way to make it easier to bring people back together for fun and profit and maybe for both.

As for people looking like each other, well, our species has dealt with that for millennia. We won’t have to worry about that – except for those sit-com and Shakespearean moments – until the robots arrive. Have you seen this year’s robots? Maybe we have less time than I thought.

PS If you made it this far in this post, you may also be interested in one scenario that I played with in my sci-fi novel, Firewatcher. They worried about a future they couldn’t control, and left this planet for another one. Hey, strange things are happening. Who knows? Anything is possible.