Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

i will say, the most alarming thing i’ve come across in the AI space is this:

i’ve spoken with various, quite large, financial institutions about their plans to integrate AI into member account management self service workflows. check my balance, make a transfer, that kinda stuff.

the area i always drill in on is “how is the AI tooling able to authenticate the customer?”

the answer is usually something along the lines of “well it has access to information in the member database that it can use to ask questions that verify identity.”

so then i ask, “so lets say it verifies the identity of the customer and connects to your core banking systems - is it connecting as that customer would - or with some sort of super user access, like an employee for example?”

the answer is nearly always: “oh its got a service account that can connect to everything”

so then i say, “well, what stops the customer from using the AI’s privileged access to access information belonging to other customers?”

and then the answer is usually: “well…the AI just knows.”

and then you let them sit with that answer and often times it dawns on them.

I'm yet again reminded that accessibility technologies are priced unfairly. Did you know that a pair of hearing aids starts at roughly £500 but an average model can easily cost over £1500? And it's not like it's rocket science.
Similarly, Braille displays start at £1500, but can easily cost over £5000.
Similarly, the most popular and one of the most affordable Braille printers costs almost £3000.

Something can be said about special design requirements for such devices, or about the fact that there is no demand to make them at the scale that would allow to cut the costs ten times. And I can't even say that a high price is an excuse; if you'd try to build a Braille embosser that can operate at practical speeds with decent reliability using off the shelf components, you are likely to spend more money on it than you'd spend getting a commercial solution, even without R&D costs.

So, uh, folks, we can do better. I can't be the only one who keeps thinking about making such technologies cheaper, right?

And of course on a SiliconGraphics workstation there's also a 3D gopher client: GopherVR