Digital arrest

 

A friend has a sententiously honeyed heart. He is as observant of the present carriers of youth—the opposite gender, of course—as I’m of book titles massed around. Recently his father received a WhatsApp call, ‘Your son is in custody on rape charges.’ The fake police officer spoke with gruesome, jarring authenticity. With exulting clamminess they continued, ‘If you want him out, pay money without delay. There is no time to lose because there is pressure to register FIR. If it’s done, nobody can save him from prison.’

The malevolent bluff is then surreptitiously changed into reality by the menacingly maneuverable algorithms of artificial intelligence, which gleans facts about a person’s voice, image, manner and produces a virtual reality—the life-like audio and video of that person. ‘Father please save me!’ his son is heard pleading in the background. The artificially generated voice of his son beckons paternal fears. His father finds it plausible just like my father would believe if the fraudsters had called him saying his son has robbed a bookstore. It was sheer luck that the old man’s account wasn’t plundered by the ultra-modern heathens. His grandson arrived as a grand good-luck gift. He called his father immediately who informed him that he was on the way from office.