Predicting the Future: How Will AI Impact Crime?

Generational AI advances are happening at a dizzying pace - providing wonderful mind fodder for sci fi authors, investors, engineers and even folks like me who love to ponder the future. Futuristic crimes create wonderful sci fi book plots as well as dinner party discussions.

What is reality today would have been hard to imagine just a few short years ago. Deep AI fakes are being used to scam people to save a loved one from a supposed tragedy in the "Grandparents Scam" - criminals only need access to 2-3 seconds of a person's voice to clone it almost perfectly. And sophisticated criminals tricked a finance worker into transferring $10M into a fraudulent account after a conference call with a deep faked voice and video call with "the CFO" of her firm. But what about the future?

I am sure we will see the day that deep fake robots will impersonate loved ones, public figures, and politicians - with an almost unlimited number of criminal scenarios possible. Imagine what a rich widow would do if she saw her beloved husband alive and well before her? Could he bilk her out of her life savings? As they say in the upper Midwest - you betcha.

Biometrics such as fingerprints and iris scans are considered golden standards today - but for how long? And how long until unique block chain algorithms can be cracked by AI?

Self driving cars create a whole new arena for enterprising criminals. Several years back, the show Extant dramatically exited Halle Berry's characters husband when his self-driving car was hacked to stall on a train track at the exact time a train was coming. Bam! Cars could be hijacked, to take unwilling victims directly to a location where they could be robbed without witnesses. Cars could record conversations to glean key information, self driving trucks with critical cargo could be redirected, and locks could be opened remotely by hackers. And how much easier could a kidnapping be carried out?

Product scams could climb to new dimensions, as deeply faked results for snake oil products along with deep faked celebrity endorsers convince innocent victims to part with their money.

These are easy extrapolations from the now, but AI provides opportunity for quantum leaps of possibility. Remember the movie Oceans 11? Just imagine how much easier that heist could have been with the aid of AI. What if AI were used to time every second of a bank or art exhibit heist, using every detail known about the location?

All of this is great brain candy for a writer. One can only hope that our criminal justice system can keep up.