As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
One of Frank Zappa's insightful observations may have been about drugs, but it could apply to anything (including AI):
A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound.
The problem comes in when people who take drugs
treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.
"As drones evolve, so does their criminal potential." Yup. "As electric cars evolve, so does their criminal potential." Okay, uh, sure, I guess so. "As turtles evolve, so does their criminal potential." Wait, what?
Paper based advertising and con artists always existed, but the availability of email over the Internet made automation possible and opened up the possibility to do that on a totally new scale with spam and phishing. The example in the post (impersonating an old mother) is a kind of phishing that doesn't scale if criminals have to do it by themselves. An AI able to handle the conversation would make it possible to make much more money in a single day. By the way, that would be detrimental to the less technological criminals because there is a limit to the number of such a calls you can believe. Probably either 0 or 1. A "90% of the market vs all the others" rule for criminals as well?
Seriously though, the level of evil that can be perpetrated as technology evolves is scary and I ask myself sometimes whether humanity's wisdom will manage to catch up to it's intelligence before it destroys itself in very creative ways... Though I must admit that criminal AI feels much less threatening to me than criminal biotechnology.
Hack into some database to steal bioweapon designs (or invent one by itself), get a few chemical companies to assemple components, bribe some poor schmuck into mixing the vials together, boom.
THB though, what I fear is individuals. Humans as a group behave often in batshit insane ways, but most of the time, they're a peaceful and kind species. But you always have, by the random lottery of genes and environment, crazy people. What technology does is magnifying the power a single person can wield, and thus the damage they can do. Self-replicating stuff is particularly nasty power amplifier here.
What will it be like when it's AI all the way down?
1) Because of new thing "X", bad things are going to happen.
2) Quote a government bureaucrat to "confirm" it.
3) What wasn't used in this article surprisingly was some government program to "help", but in reality just takes things away from people.
"- Artificial Intelligence is really bad for X. I lost Y because of it. Ban Artificial Intelligence! Let's keep our jobs and our family safe!
- Dude. You have no idea what you're talking about."
For god's shake, it is 2016, we are still unable to have a decent dependency system for most programming languages. AI is still decades far to rise up against us.
On the other hand, "Mirai botnet". Even the "mere humans" are doing pretty darned good laying hands on vast powers in the current environment.
The hard-to-believe part is an AI that is much smarter than human. Once you have that, I have no problem swallowing that it could pretty much hack whatever it wanted in our current world as long as it could get a connection. That's not because I believe in magical hacking powers, it's because we demonstrably don't really care much about security and we get exactly the systems you'd expect as a result. My local red team [1] seems to be able to get past pretty much anything it wants to and they're not superhuman AIs.
An AI that operated in a world where all programming languages were memory-safe would at least have a harder time of things. Though between things like Rowhammer and much higher-level hacking (social engineering, for instance), I suspect it would still not face much challenge.
I'm not saying that will happen or is even probable but when A.I. Does happen it's not inconceivable it could easily take over everything. I doubt most current state actors have 10k engineers looking for exploits. And, with a.i. that number will only increase as the a.i. is duplicated or expanded.
I mean at this point you're just making things up...
Suppose I can talk into a tiny little device and someone can hear me from miles away.
That sounded like witchcraft at some point but it became a reality. Futuristic thinking needs to suppose lots of crazy-sounding things are possible.
Suppose I can think into a tiny little device and someone can hear me from miles away.
That still sounds like witchcraft. Before one of them gets invented, or at least the basic underlying principles are discovered, how do you tell them apart?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10567942/Supercomputer...
The above supercomputer in 2014 was 2400X slower than the human brain. Moore's law is dead so I think your 10000X and 2030 estimates are grossly optimistic.
I see no reason to believe A.I. will be any different. But then I don't believe Moore's law is dead. We'll find other ways to extend it. Insert magic here.
http://michaelgalloy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/cpu-vs-g...
Jazz hands
I think we simply have no idea when this could happen, it could be in 20, it could be in 200. But one thing is sure, when it will happen, this will have drastic implications for our society, so why not start thinking about it now, in case it's 20 and not 200?
Yet I don't see us losing our heads over the chance of an alien invasion.
Considering the evolution of computing and technology in general in the last 50 years would you consider the two things to be remotely comparable?
I personally don't.
We just assume technology will improve exponentially based on an extremely small sample size. Has it never occurred to us that the technology curve may horizontally asymptotic as opposed to exponential?
The ICE was an amazing piece of technology that grew rapidly, from cars to military warplanes, to our lawnmowers. Yet we can not make them much more efficient or powerful without significantly increasing resources and cost. If you judged the potential of the ICE on the growth it had then, we'd be living in an efficiency utopia now.
Path 1 is understand how the brain organizes info. Recreate those structures with algorithms. This path is 100+ years away
Path 2 is just simulate various kinds of neurons with no understanding of how they represent higher level concepts. This path is < 20 years away by some estimates
You probably believe path #2 is either also 100+ years away or won't work. I happen to think it will work the same way physics simulations mostly work. We write the simulation and then check to see if it matches reality. We don't actually have to understand reality at a high level to make the simulation. We just simulate the low level and then check if the resulting high level results match reality. It certainly seems possible A.I. can be achieved by building only the low-level parts and then watching the high-level result.
"We didn't achieve flight by simulating birds; we needn't worry about achieving ai by simulating brains."
Assuming your assumptions, and assuming it had access to the information, you meant one day, not one year.
People keep worrying about Google or Facebook or the media controlling and shaping the info streams.
What if they cant? What if we have already passed the point where things can be controlled.
Does anybody really believe Google or Facebook will admit that they have lost control?
It doesn't appear that people have had any real difficulty pulling off scams where they pretend to be the IRS, or Microsoft tech support, or some other entity to extract money. The AI would only eliminate their call center costs.
It may not require much sampling to impersonate someone's voice based on these constructs.
If you solved that problem you would command Gates/Musk/Bezos levels of wealth from the legitimate applications.
There's a saying about good measures ceasing to be so when they become targets.
Goodhart's Law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
And yet, we have bots, spyware, malware, etc. infecting the IoT devices already, think what will happen if a more "Evolved AI" attacks these devices (or even worse, us!)?
I remember some years ago reading that many of those social media quizes like "Which [random TV show] character are you" or "if you were a color, what color would you be" are run by companies that are slowly aggregating consumer behavior and background data on everybody.
With access to this database, and a semi-intelligent bot that's been given instructions, one could build an collection of people who meet certain criteria.
You could filter people down to determine who is most easily influenced by peers and have the bot befriend them and act as a peer. This power could be used to simply influence them to have certain consumer behaviors, or it could be used to cause online malcontents to move to the real world and take up arms against governments.
You could filter for people who were "easy targets" to trick them and steal their life savings, or better yet, convince them to send you their life savings.
You could run a fake church and find the people easily swayed by your specific brand of faith or family that they crave.
You could find not just the next lone gunman, you could find a thousand lone gunmen or bombers and set them off all at the same time against a wide variety of targets.
You could convince 10,000 people to invest a pittance into a penny stock to make it soar and cash out.
You could trigger viral boycotts or artificially construct "Grassroots" organizations.
Similar to a recent Black Mirror episode, you could blackmail people but make it automated. Bots could scour the internet for "deviant behavior" in safe pseudo-anonymous communities but connect the profile to real-world profiles and automate threatening them for some kind of action or payout.
On the other hand, many of these things could also be used for good depending on your viewpoint. A true believer in a cause might like the ability to easily find and reach out to people who believe in the same cause to form a grassroots campaign.
A church with low attendance numbers might be able to find more members for their flock.
An intelligent bot system with psychological and marketing profiles on everyone in a country could be used by humanitarians to give certain categories of people (brave, natural leaders with compassion) the prodding and emotional support they need to stand up to militants or warlords.
An automated bot that connects pseudo-anonymous identities with real identities could be used to privately and discretely tell trolls to stop their negative behavior.
If the tool kits arrive, I anticipate a new wild west of uses... negative, positive, and purely exploitative.
STOP already! There's no such thing. There won't be such thing. You have 0 idea about what you are talking about.