The other day, I read a breathless article on how AI could identify a human by what they typed and how they typed it. The idea was, each person has a unique typing "fingerprint" or "fist", meaning a combination of their speed, the mistakes they make, their pauses etc. Obviously, systems have been around for some years now that distinguish between machine typing and human typing, but the new systems go further than that; they identify individuals.
The article suggested this was something new and unique, but I'm not sure it is. Read the following paragraph and guess when it was written:
"Radio Security would be monitoring the call, as they monitored every call from an agent. Those instruments which measured the minute peculiarities in an operator's 'fist' would at once detect it wasn't Strangways at the key. Mary Trueblood had been shown the forest of dials in the quiet room on the top floor at headquarters, had watched as the dancing hands registered the weight of each pulse, the speed of each cipher group, the stumble over a particular letter. The Controller had explained it all to her when she had joined the Caribbean station five years before--how a buzzer would sound and the contact be automatically broken if the wrong operator had come on the air."
The excerpt is from Ian Fleming's Dr. No and was written in 1957 (published in 1958). However, this idea goes back further in time. I've read articles about World War II radio communication where the women working in the receiving stations could identify who was sending morse code by their patterns of transmission (using the same methods Ian Fleming talked about). There's even mention of it on a Wikipedia page and there are several online articles about ham radio operators recognizing each other's "fists".
What AI is doing here isn't new and unique. It's doing something that's been possible for a long time but doing it more quickly and more cheaply. The latter part is the most important piece of the story, by reducing the cost, AI enables the technology to be widely used.
In the past, the press and other commentators have missed important societal changes brought on by rapid technology cost reductions. This happened because reporters focused on technical gee-whiz 'breakthrough' stories rather than cost reduction stories The obvious example is containerization and the consequential huge reduction in shipping costs that enabled global competition in manufactured goods and from there to regional deindustrialization. Low shipping costs are one of the main reasons why we can't easily go back to the good old days of manufacturing in deindustrialized area. But how often do you see shipping costs discussed in the press? Given the press missed the impact of containerization, what are they going to miss for the impact of AI?
Journalists have limited word counts for articles. The article I read about typing "fists" should have talked about the implications of the cost reduction instead of the technical 'breakthrough' aspect. Some journalists (and newspapers) just seem to miss the point.
