'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices COMPUTEX 2026 In his Computex keynote speech this week Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon offered a glimpse of an AI-augmented future straight out of an episode of Black Mirror. According to Amon, agents — automated systems which harness AI models to automate complex tasks without the need for human supervision — will fundamentally …
Why are all these coked up CEOs celebrating the implementation of a panopticon which will destroy privacy, personal life, employment and society?
Maybe they really are all planning to retreat to their bunkers and wait out the destruction of humanity, burning down society so that they may rule over the ashes.
The governments are drooling over all of this. Finally a total control of the plebs. And there is no way to stop this train. No way to make it crash into a wall. I used to hope that this AI nightmare would crash and burn, but it's not going to happen because the tech bros and the governments want this to go on full steam ahead, and they have the means to make it happen.
A lot of money will be spent, resources used up, energy gobbled, environmental damages done, and then everyone but the tech bros will be much poorer and under constant surveillance.
AI-driven pre-crime police will be the next logical step, rest assured.
We are so fucked. I hope we all die in a nuclear war. The current "civilization" needs a big reset.
AI-driven pre-crime police will be the next logical step, rest assured.
It's called 'profiling', and has been with us for a long time now. No AI needed, just human bigotry.
We are so fucked. I hope we all die in a nuclear war. The current "civilization" needs a big reset.
This seems an odd wish.
I will point out that it's not AI that's currently killing a load of people in the middle east, or eastern Europe. (But it's okay because God, or History says that's fine).
I also have another question for you... what's so wrong with your own life? This is a serious point.
If you don't listen to the news or doom scroll the internet, but actually look at your own life, is it really so terrible at the moment? Sure I wish my streets had fewer potholes, and that stuff wasn't as expensive... but those kind of wishes I've had most of my life, I'd always like it to be a bit better.
I do however have my health (thanks largely to the many advances in medical science made in my lifetime), my friends and family. I'm lucky enough to live in a developed country where the current world problems cause me inconvenience rather than real hardship.
I think there's a real risk we assume things are much much worse than they are.
I'd certainly not want to live through a nuclear war.
"We are so fucked."
Don't be so willing to surrender. We the people have a say in our own destiny. Big Tech (and Big Politics, I imagine) want to have AI pervade every aspect of our lives so they have more control over what we do (and if they had their way, also over what we think.) But we don't have to just sit by idly and accept their intentions. I have avoided anything with AI in it. That's getting harder to do, I realize, as all these Big organizations want to force AI on us at every turn. But what if we originate a mass effort to require every product with AI come with a switch to turn AI features off? I'm paying for all these devices and the software that runs on them, so I should have a say in how my devices are used.
> But what if we originate a mass effort to require every product with AI come with a switch to turn AI features off? I'm paying for all these devices and the software that runs on them, so I should have a say in how my devices are used.
It's cute that you believe this is even possible. Can you get Microsoft to stop shipping crap patches? Can you make Google go back to not "being evil", or even to make search work again?
The oligarchs aren't interested in the plebe's, er, "consumer's", thoughts.
> I have avoided anything with AI in it.
Still possible now, but it will become neigh impossible in a couple years as the old, "dumb" appliances reach their planned obsolescence and there are only AI-powered ones to be had.
Of course you can stop using any technical device and go live with the Amish, but are you willing to do so?
Maybe they really are all planning to retreat to their bunkers and wait out the destruction of humanity, burning down society so that they may rule over the ashes. ..... may_i
In your dreams, may_i, for matters are considerably more complex and sophisticatedly engaging than that very wishful let’s-just-wait-and-see-what-happens scenario.
The destruction and replacement of current failing leading humanity programs/projects/media operations with superior advanced instructive AI agent alternatives is that which you have not yet realised has materialised and being autonomously virtually delivered with daily 0day presentations for you to try to deny is a Rabid and Rapidly Evolving Universal Reality and as Stealthily ACTive as every Novel and Virile and Virulent Alien Plague can so easily be in Fields of Intangible Terrain with Invisible and Almighty Means and Memes of Future Support and Infinite Succour.
"Why are all these coked up CEOs celebrating the implementation of a panopticon which will destroy privacy, personal life, employment and society?"
They don't think it will apply to them. Little do they know, there will be files held on them as well of all their peccadilloes. They will be used to force those people to kowtow once they've been shown what's in their file that they thought they were clever enough to not have.
Yes, like the whole Epstein shit. A constant war between them, made of blackmailing and extortion between them. At another level, compared to us plebs. And in the end someone dies in some "suicide" or "accident", others win, others simply obey the master's orders. And once somehow this shit becomes known to the plebs, there is someone who says "we cannot prosecute anyone of them, the whole system would collapse if we did". Which is the admission that the whole system is utterly rotten and in dire need of a Nuremberg-style trial.
> Little do they know, there will be files held on them as well of all their peccadilloes. They will be used to force those people to kowtow once they've been shown what's in their file that they thought they were clever enough to not have.
What color is the sky in your world?
> Little do they know, there will be files held on them as well of all their peccadilloes. They will be used to force those people to kowtow once they've been shown what's in their file that they thought they were clever enough to not have.
What color is the sky in your world?
Do you remember when Rudy Giuliani was riding high? He was rich, and powerful, and no one could touch him. Seen him lately?
"Because they know they're rich enough that they can afford to opt out of the panopticon."
Somebody will be out of favor right about the time a sacrifice is needed and the closet of skeletons is reveled. There's no honor amount thieves, but there's also very few friends among the wealthy.
The blunt and honest assessment is that it's a race to be the highest earner in the AI race, make the most money, and leave / destroy the competition.
In other words, all this is typical MBA-CEO-think of Profits Uber Alles, nothing more, nothing less...and, nothing new. It is the same greed that we've been seeing since a certain (two) government leaders in the '80's brought their worship of "free market" and, especially, money, front-and-center, and to hell with repercussions, those standing in the way, or those little concerns such as "morals" or "social impact".
It's money. The entire AI hype is all. about. the. Money. It has absolutely, positively, NOTHING to do with how good the tech does / will eventually work, it is about creating the most profitable returns from the project while they can. ROI, baby.
how come we don't have a Monopoly "Rich Uncle" Pennybags icon?? It'll fit the modern times
> this shift will be driven by economics. “Resistance is futile"
I guess he's correct there, just not in the way he thinks.
Think about the economic impact of your security perimeter stopping being a more or less well defined perimeter and transforming into an amorphous, ever changing multidimensional space of threats and vulnerabilities encompassing several dimensions.
Agent = LLM+tools. LLMs are not able to distinguish between instructions and data. Neither do they have a clear concept of an "information" or "understanding". Everything is just text, even the stuff it just scraped off some fringe Reddit group.
This procedure sometimes kind of produces the wanted results, in very controlled environments.
But use this in the real world as described in this CEO fantasy, and you'll lose your life savings, your car and your house in under a day to LLM-induced security holes.
The negative economic impact of a complete insecure technology basically taking over everything would bring down the economy.
So I guess resistance in this case just means finding and describing the security consequences of this ideas.
> I guess resistance in this case just means finding and describing the security consequences of this ideas.
Unfortunately for most people security is a bad thing (i.e. something inconvenient, annoying, you need to bypass to "get work done").
I mean people should have heard by now that using "password1" (or the name of their offspring/pet) as a password is a bad idea. And yet. All those people won't mind the somewhat abstract issues you mentioned even if they understood them, they will only hear "AI will assist me" and "AI is cool, all the cool kids use it" (which obviously marketing will keep repeating, with pictures of desirable, young and visibly successful people glowing with barely contained bliss).
> The quote is deliberately referencing the Cybermen
Now there is a blast from the past: "Tomb of the Cybermen" with Patrick Troughton was their heyday for that phrase. The modern ones all about "Delete!" or "Upgrades".
Now, the Borg. The Borg are really into the futility of resistance, as well as assimilating biological and technological distinctiveness.
"I think resistance (like poisoning the data that they harvest from you) is the DUTY of any right-minded technical person."
It's also important to not be fatalistic and just give up on withholding personal data wherever possible. I lie everywhere it doesn't put me in a legal bind. Often times, just for practice. I don't even give my real name at the take away when I order.
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"Don't forget, paying with cash doesn't leave an audit trail with your name on either."
It will one day. As soon as banknotes have RFID tags for counterfeit protection they will be tracked. Cash points and shop tills will have readers in them to track the flow of individual notes. Even if you acquire a banknote without the system knowing, it won't be long before it figures it out. As soon as you put a banknote near your phone, your car, your washing machine, your hearing aids, underpants, anything with an RFID scanner in it or even if someone else walks past you or sits near you and their phone detects your banknotes and any single other thing that identifies you, the system will then know which banknotes you have, where you got them from and where you get rid of them. Exchanging banknotes in a shop won't save you either because somewhere, there will be CCTV identifying you and associating you with those notes.
Yes, there will still be ways of avoiding that surveillance, but those ways will get harder and harder until eventually they only way will be to buy your own remote wilderness and live in it as a hermit.
"As soon as banknotes have RFID tags for counterfeit protection they will be tracked."
That has been tried and the difficulty is the RFID working long term. Notes get crunched up, soaked, folded and generally abused to the point where the cost doesn't work for the longevity that they get. That's before somebody might do a wee bit of microsurgery to make sure the RFID doesn't work. If that renders the bill void, that's a problem.
I've been able to delete the NFC function on my debit card without affecting the chip+pin functionality. A break in the antenna coil kills it. I once had payment happen after pulling out my wallet where the terminal was rather low to be usable by those in a wheelchair. I had no idea what card it read until going through the receipt which led me to making sure that would never happen again. I don't find it too inconvenient to stick my card in the terminal and enter my PIN. I would find it inconvenient to discover that my bank account was empty.
> Don't forget, paying with cash doesn't leave an audit trail with your name on either.
That's why they try to make it disappear all over the world (some countries are further ahead than others), to be replaced by some electronic payment means which governments can trace [1], and ad slingers can use to know precisely what you usually spend your money on [2].
.
[1] To prevent money laundering and tax evasion.
[2] Even if at first they pinky promise they won't sell your information. But of course it won't last, as the Bible (almost) says: "The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak."
"That's why they try to make it disappear all over the world (some countries are further ahead than others)"
When I used to travel internationally much more, getting cards to work could sometimes be difficult. Maybe it's better now, but I'd not want to be standing at a forecourt and not be able to get my foreign card to work. I also would rather pay cash than to keep getting assessed a conversion fee every stinkin' time. I'm not sure what I would do if a card was deactivated while traveling. Trying to deal with a bank/card company across many time zones would not be fun.
> I'm not sure what I would do if a card was deactivated while traveling.
Just have several cards, from different networks (AMEX, Visa, Mastercard), one is bound to work. That's what I do, especially since some networks are more or less accepted in some countries.
"Don't forget, paying with cash doesn't leave an audit trail with your name on either."
Pay with cash and no rewards card/digital coupon. I'm noticing that the digital coupon where you are asked to scan a QR code on the shelf to save a few P are increasing. I expect that is giving them even more data even if you don't buy that thing. My favorite grocery store doesn't do coupons and doesn't take credit cards and their prices are by far the lowest. They are also big stores with lots of selection and a bulk section.
Chuckling.... You can't be tracked by what you don't buy... Tokenomics still doesn't add up. After multi-trillion dollars in capital expenditures over the past three years and repeated rounds of fundraising, the bill will come due at sometime. Seems Qualcomm's CEO's glasses are rose-colored. The dystopian vision he laid out certainly doesn't correspond to any vision of the future I'll part of. If we can survive the "gifted orangutan", we'll survive AI as well...
It's a debloated Samsung, Google didn't even manage to force Gemini onto it which I was surprised about.
And no, people won't be desperate to get a new phone with AI pre-installed, because phone prices are going up thanks to... AI. By that time hopefully all this nonsense will have gone pop.
i'm genuinely interested to see where this ahit is coming from? LIDAR did everything he says yet Waymos are getting dumber the more they are trained. there was a really interesting article which i can't find about waymo, school districts & the police working together to stop the cars from ignoring school bus red lights.
with all the extra training they implemented, the cars still didn't stop for the big yellow bus with flashing red lights... surely the easiest IF THEN statement you can create..yet they didn't. $millions on training & it didn't work.
the exact quote "when we give a human a ticket, 99% of them won't repeat the error. The Waymos actually ignored the lights more"
Agents will not do anything but kill people
" LIDAR did everything he says yet Waymos are getting dumber the more they are trained. "
I had a music teacher that clarified the old phrase, "practice makes perfect". Perfect practice makes perfect. Learning loads of bad habits is going to make it harder to unlearn them later once they're baked into muscle memory. Throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at training will lead to bad outcomes.
It's often argued that young criminals that are never held accountable never learn as there's more pleasure than pain. Do a crime and two hours later they're back out hanging with their friends and possibly richer, so the arrest was just a minor cost of doing business.
> surely the easiest IF THEN statement you can create..yet they didn't.
Because nobody creating the (current) crop of self-driving cars are doing *anything* at all with IF THEN or any other sensible programming statements when it comes to actually deciding what the vehicle is going to do. *How* it does it, yes: set this line high and the (totally separate) ABS brakes subsystem will come on and try to hold k amount of braking force. *When* to set that line and in reaction to what stimuli: (shrugs) I dunno; sompting, I guess.
> $millions on training & it didn't work
Bluntly, the "training" is done on a fingers-crossed basis: it is little more than a carrot and stick, "reward" the "AI" when it takes a step closer towards your desired goal (stopping for a school bus) and hope it one day reaches the goal. Trouble is, they don't really know what the insides of the "AI" are doing, what is is *actually* reacting to. During training and demo runs, perfect scores. Let it loose on the real world and the little kiddies are being treated like skittles. Oops. Because you didn't spot that all your training sessions had the bus stopped next to a wisteria and that is what the machine learning thought you were trying to reinforce...
I tried signing up for a Bolt account a couple of years ago because they were doing a signup bonus and I needed a taxi (which I do about once a year). I couldn't complete the signup because it kept telling me my email address on my personal .UK (not .CO.UK) domain was invalid.
I also had a similar to Steve above with my postcode which is only 5 digits (A1 1AA format). A website required the postcode to be entered with no spaces and then tried using the first 3 characters to find my area instead of the first 2.
Postcode format validation in UK is pretty hard unless you actually use a lookup table because there are at least 6 different formats of letters and numbers I know of (A1 1AA, A11 1AA, AA1 1AA, AA11 1AA, A1A 1AA and AA1A 1AA), the only consistent bit being the last 3 characters (after the space) always follow the format 1AA
Not mine it's not. It's a thing I carry around so I can keep in touch with people. Mostly via SMS. I actively avoid using it for reading the web (because it's bad at it, it's too small) or doing email (can't type on it) or watching video (too small again).
My phone is a phone. If you replaced it with the one I carried in 2005 it would make very little difference to me. The centre of my digital life is my desktop PC and I just really don't see that changing.
Needed to get a 2FA this evening. Turns out I'd left my 'phone untouched in my backpack since last Friday and the battery was flat as a pancake. Never noticed. Hey ho, plug it in for a bit, go and have supper an a bit of telly (Freeview!) and if the code has timed out, meh, just click "resend".
My phone isn't the centre of my "digital life" either, but you have to remember this man runs a company making chips for phones. To him every problem has a phone sized solution. There might be differing form factors in future, and differing amounts of connectivity required to make it all work (hence his comment about 6G), but essentially all he is saying is "You will need our products".
Of course the vast majority of people on the planet will not need his products. OK, most people might have a mobile of some form, but they won't get the incredibly expensive and inessential wearables, watches, glasses, etc.
And there will be a backlash against those who do: "No thank you, I'm having a quiet pint in my local and I do not want to be part of your feed". Can't wait for cafes to start advertising 6G free zones instead of Wi-Fi hotspots...
“The phone, today, is at the center of your digital life and therefore everything is around the phone,” he said.
Speak for yourself mate!
"And of course, Amon expects, 6G networks will supercharge these sensing capabilities. "
Oh, that's ok then, it'll be 20 years before 6G has 99% coverage (that's really about 50%) in the UK.
“If you have smart glasses, they see what you see, so the connectivity needs to enable a very fast uplink,” he said. “6G is going to make all of us into walking cameras in this world.”
Yep, if you want to be a glasshole, you just go ahead. The rest of us will shun you.
This guy is just doing schilling of Qualcomm - what he is proposing isn't even remotely feasible in the real world.
It may work in a little Silicon Valley bubble, but at scale? - no chance.
The cost, complexity and social upheaval are so immense, it'll take decades for something like this horror to happen and let's all pray it doesn't.
If it even gets close, the kick back not just from individuals, but businesses, will be sure to scupper these insane plans.
"Yep, if you want to be a glasshole, you just go ahead. The rest of us will shun you."
There has to be some sort of payoff to having those glasses. If there's no reward, people will lose interest. I did see an application where glasses were used to instantly translate what somebody was saying to text projected on the glasses. If a similar thing could be added to safety glasses, a technician might be able to get service information on something via voice. An even smarter system could be used that senses the view and can point at things or give directions to somebody to find some part of a machine. "Airframe" by Micheal Crichton had this as a story element. Way back after uni when I was working on audio electronics, it would have be a big time saver to just ask for schematics, board layouts and trouble shooting information I could see in my glasses.
For day to day wear, I'd reject being a glasshole. It would be too distracting and there are enough people wandering about banging off the walls and falling in manholes as it is.
There are loads of genuinely sensible uses for having data displays in glasses, even including a camera and using an AR overlay.
> Way back after uni when I was working on audio electronics, it would have be a big time saver to just ask for schematics...
Trouble is, all the engineering ones are treated as premium products, not anything that can sell many headsets, and they get priced to match. There have been "Tomorrow's World" style presentations about such uses for decades and they flop.
But trying to sell to Joe Public to get the numbers up and prices down with scale - well, the techbros sure as hell don't want the latter, so the "offerings" just get worse and worse, more tie-in to the "ecosystem", subscriptions etc.
Bleugh.
Those augmented reality glasses do exist, and actually do work (apparently) in a technical context. I think most moved to HoloLens? Cannot recall where I read that, so take it with a grain of salt (and a teaspoon of chillie powder). One problem you will run into for your use case is that most companies do not publish their schematics :/ so as Joe Average you cannot take advantage of that funtionality. Maybe for troubleshooting your own stuff? Like having the circuit diagram really close by, being able to sort of mark in the diagram what you already put down on perfboard?
I would like to say that - purely hypothetically - I hope we could normalise beating up glassholes again (there were some incidents when they first cropped up...) but of course I would never encourage violent behaviour, right?
"One problem you will run into for your use case is that most companies do not publish their schematics"
The company I worked for was the official repair depot for Yamaha, Fender and other music products. We had schematics for all of their products and could request any that we didn't have in stock. An airline will have full documentation for the aircraft they operate.
For Joe Public, you are correct and it's really pointless. If I have a piece of gear and can't find a service shop to repair it due to lack of documentation and access to parts, I may have to replace that gear and it means shopping what's current rather than keeping what I have. A perfect place for a company to lose a customer/user. That might be due to one niggling thing that I lived with that another brand does better.
The next horde of glassholes don't need to be given a taste of the lash, but shunning seems perfectly acceptable. There can be glasshole free zones where they'd be shown the egress and given a mild push to help them through.
This might come true, and might be useful. But I also guesstimate that it would need 100x the compute of today's most powerful models... And it would run continuously.
Or maybe even more. It's probably very difficult to build today just because of the raw performance you would need.
Aaaaaand then battery life, imagine if your devices was on streaming hi res video ALL THE TIME. Your phone would probably last about an hour, maybe 2. Smart glasses are lucky to get 20 minutes.
And this is without them doing any compute!
Remember Open Source causes cancer in California, and Linux is terrorist so obviously needs banning.
Ballmer was referring to the freedom of the GNU GPL version 2, that requires the modified versions and derivative works thereof remain *free software* and does not say "open".
Remember that the GPLv2 was released in 1991 and the concept of "open source" [software] didn't exist until 1998.
Also remember that the kernel, Linux, despite being the poster child of "open source", isn't even 50% source-available!
I looked at the size of all the proprietary binaries, without source code, that are part of Linux and even accounting for duplication, due to keeping around old versions for each binary updated in lockstep, the missing source code is clearly longer than the source code allegedly available under the GPLv2-only.
Wow that was a wrong article, but that's to be expected of the register m$.
The poster appears to be about programs for the GNU OS (of course GNU is terrorist - enjoying freedom is considered terrorist after all).
While the "open source [intelligence]" term dates back to the 1950s, it had absolutely nothing to do with software, considering the concept of overt sources and publicly available information, is totally irrelevant to software.
In 1998, a group decided to stretch the term so far it snapped by applying it to a totally unrelated concept for software (a concept that the GPLv1 & GPLv2 long predates), despite it being obvious it would cause confusion (it appears that it was an intentional choice, as that's what their corporate masters wanted - confusion is deemed 1000x better, than a risk of people learning that software freedom is even a concept).
“If you have smart glasses, they see what you see, so the connectivity needs to enable a very fast uplink,” he said.
“6G is going to make all of us into walking cameras in this world.”
Yeah, no. Why would I inflict that shite on myself, and make myself a walking target for both ridicule, and muggers?
"I would think that the backlash from someone walking around effectively spying on everyone around them may well promote a more extreme response"
I think we'd also start seeing driving laws that preclude wearing them while driving, riding a bike, boating. Sure, they could be projecting nav data, but probably aren't.
Is the plan to have a sarcastic pop star from Sheffield follow you around to make rye comments about financial inequality ? Sounds good to me.
Or is that how a columnist called "Tobias" pronounces Jeeves ?
Is it one of those posh southern things like calling someone "sinjon" ?
Douglas Adams couldn't write this stuff (and retain his sanity.)
"The phone, today, is at the center of your digital life and therefore everything is around the phone," — Really ?
Even if that were the case, the unrelenting enshittification of the services accessed from from these phones will reduce the importance of the phone (and other devices.)
"Resistance is futile" — The Qualcomm wet dream this drongo is describing is insanely complex and as such likely to fail in an infinite variety of ways without any opposition from the population.
When was it, do you think, that technology moved from doing useful things that made our lives easier, into this highly financialised sort of arrangement where it's all about "adding value" but no one seems to be able to tell what the value is?
2000: We've got a phone where you can get email! Me: Awesome - I can be on call and not have to carry my laptop around with me. That's very helpful.
2026: We've got glasses that record everything that you see and upload it to the mothership for analysis! Me: ...um... how does that help me?
"Microsoft researchers have found that even the priciest frontier models introduce errors in long workflows, the very thing for which AI software has been pitched."
Shirley Cristiano Amon meant "“Resistance is useless" as per the Vogons rather than "futile" a la Cybermen? The latter would be relatively benign overlords (and at least technically capable) compared with these overpaid tech bro lunatics.
