Serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who runs X, Tesla, xAI and several other innovative companies, has taken to his own social media platform X (formerly famous as Twitter) to warn the global community about a clear possibility of “Black Mirror” TV series coming true in real life soon.
Musk’s warning was about a new AI product announced by Microsoft – the patron of OpenAI which Musk sued earlier this year.
Elon Musk’s “Black Mirror” warning
Elon Musk has commented on the new AI feature presented by Microsoft. It is called “Recall.” This addition to the Windows operating system will constantly take screenshots on users’ computers to let them remember and quickly access everything they did on their computers in archives later.
Elon Musk pointed out that this sounds like an episode from the TV series Black Mirror – the project was made to show likely dystopian scenarios of how technologies in the future may be used for controlling and ruling global population to wide TV audiences.
Musk tweeted that he will definitely turn this Microsoft feature off.
This is a Black Mirror episode.
Definitely turning this “feature” off. https://t.co/bx1KLqLf67
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2024
New Microsoft “Recall” feature described by CEO Nadella
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that Recall is a way to introduce photographic memories into users’ history. They will be able to do a semantic search in it if they want to recall what they did on the PCs at a certain point, on a certain day, in a particular month, year, etc, to “recreate moments from the past.” Then all this data will be processed with an AI to make it searchable.
One of the biggest AI features launched in the Copilot Plus PCs is called ‘Recall’
It allows users to search and recall anything they’ve seen and interacted with on their computer screens, with natural language.pic.twitter.com/Ls66btuAvr
— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) May 21, 2024
Musk saw another point here, though. The tech magnate perhaps implied that this data with screenshots can be easily accessed and used for controlling users’ actions and to see what exactly web pages they visited, to have a peek into their personal files, photos, correspondence, etc. In the conditions of strengthening authoritarian and totalitarian regimes around the world, this could become one of the perfect tools for controlling the population through constant surveillance of their PCs.
Satya Nadella assures that this will be only done locally on users’ PC and that those who believe this feature could be dangerous and privacy interfering have nothing to worry about.