The industry most of us think of when we say mining is digging material out of the ground, like coal. For others it may be mining our personal digital data. However, how many of us would think of mining our voices for data?
Yes, a future gold mine is analysing our voices. Billions of dollars are being invested in voice technologies. The reason is these miners believe that voices are hard to fake and contain information about people that will be invaluable. In fact, voice technology alone is expected to be worth 15.5 billion in ten years.
An Israeli company is already analysing voices for commercial use. They believe voice analysis has the ability to predict whether someone is likely to default on a bank loan, buy a more expensive product or be a best candidate for a job. They also believe voices can be predictors of mental health.
The analysis is based not on what people say but how they say it. How, specifically, I have no idea, except it is about feeding data into algorithms and machine learning. Can you imagine the ramifications if the algorithm gets it wrong? Not that that has happened before.
The voice activated gold mines are not difficult to find. Anyone who owns voice activated technologies like Alexa or voice activated journals or medical records can own their own mine.
What about privacy you may ask? That is, if you even know your voice data is mineable.
I suspect privacy issues will be raised by a few but will follow the same fate as facial recognition. There is little choice and it just becomes the new normal.
What if the predictions are wrong? Just say you were having a bad voice day, or your voice was imitated by a bot. If history is anything to go by almost nothing is going to happen; a little like the consequences of fake political bots in democratic elections, concerns are raised and fade as quickly as the 24 hour news cycle.
Unless of course the governments who write the legislation and the companies who write the policies invest in becoming as informed as the miners. One way to do this is to employ technology scouts, a little like canaries in the coal mines, who are employed to identify risks before they occur and have the mechanisms to influence people in power. A thought worth exploring.
