Proliferation of AI weapons among non-state actors could be impossible to stop
theregister.com
theregister.com
Some suggest we can use AI to counter these itself, although I haven't seen much clarity on such proposals and even if possible there is always substantial lag between nefarious use and containment.
There is so much focus on the problems of future AGI, but little on AI that we have now, working as designed, but yet still very problematic from the impacts on societal order.
I've elaborated much on the societal and social implications in the following reference. I expect AI will lead all concerns in the area of unexpected consequences in due time.
The Paris Morgue doesn’t still have corpses on display for the public.
“Death as Entertainment at the Paris Morgue”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/paris-morgue-public-vi...
I don't think there's a way to avoid that, really, because AI will be better than us at everything, so we will want to give everything over because it will make sense, and nation-states who don't will fall behind.
The question will be if we have safety mechanisms if AI starts going rogue.
I agree. There is a very large moat between where we are now and the envisioned AI that people hope for. And that moat is filled with lots of problems without any clear answers.
> because AI will be better than us at everything
Yes, I don't think this concept still has not been completely digested by most people. AI is essentially a skill/technology replication machine. It is going to bring about a crisis of meaning in society as well.
> The question will be if we have safety mechanisms if AI starts going rogue.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about and writing on this topic as well. Under the current premise of alignment theory, I believe it is a complete logical fallacy or paradox. I don't see it as a hard problem, but rather an impossible problem.
Now, this is just from the perspective of taking alignment theory's own proposed conditions. That being AI will be power seeking, scale infinitely on its own and we will solve this by applying humanities values.
I explain why I perceive this as an impossible solution here.
https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
Second, I wonder if we could force conversation-points where AI talks to other AI's to be simple and perhaps open-source.
So a AI banking API talking to the Tesla API can never say much more than "yes this driver has funds" etc. It can't talk about world domination.
And even if we were hypothetically successful, and has been demonstrated already with the release of primitive LLMs, someone out there will build unaligned AI purposely.
I was just thinking about North Korea, and how AI will enable statewide surveillance on a whole new level, but then the thought popped into my head that maybe if AI can't be stopped, it can't be stopped there either, and maybe it'll be benevolent, and in 30 years they will be freed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Hard to know how this plays out.
Hoping it will be benevolent is about the only thing we have at this point. Many, but not all, alignment safety researches believe that it will inherently exhibit properties that make for disastrous outcomes. Since they have no solution for this problem if it exists, at this point hoping they are wrong is the best option.
For the life of me I can't see how, or why, we would give AI this sort of power. Look at the power of the algorithm in social networks and see how that has taken shape. This embrace of the machine just seems so short-sighted.
Yes, great point, I also mention that very aspect in the article linked previously.
AI will likely surpass social media by orders of magnitude in both its ability to provide positive value for individuals as well as its propensity to become the dark monolith of a dystopian society under the control and manipulation of forces unseen
I think there is a perception that the machine will be able to "rise above" our own biases and limitations. However, I see that also as another fallacy for which I elaborated further here.
I imagine it could be used to make unlimited hacking attempts on websites and industrial control systems (power grids). Could be used for propaganda also. Are those what everyone is worried about or is there much more to it I'm not considering?
Two interesting thoughts that shake out of that:
- Hardware that used to be exotic and easy to control proliferation of has become significantly easier and cheaper to acquire; as an example, the MEMS gyros and accelerometers that are in your smartphone are $1 devices that 30-40 years ago would have been the size of a shoe box and orders of magnitude more expensive. Alternatively, you could download/develop code for a high-precision high-speed GPS receiver using an RTL-SDR or other low-cost software-defined radio for $20. For night vision/all-weather, you can get a decent resolution uncooled MWIR camera on AliExpress for about $1000; these have historically been ITAR-controlled, but when a factory in China starts pumping them out, ITAR kind of goes out the window.
- Software makes a lot of the exotic hardware less important too. For example, the terrain following system in a Tomahawk could likely be implemented on a $100 Jetson Nano and a low-cost global-shutter camera. Kalman filters, compute power, and redundant $1 sensors can compensate for crappy sensors.
Propaganda has always been a component of warfare, but it's always been a component of peacetime as well.
So have guns, but they're still weapons either way.
Spoken like someone who hasn't been following Putin's actions against western democracies. We should absolutely include propaganda. There are other ways of distinguishing the context in which the propaganda is used, such as the distinction between hot and cold wars.
That’s one of those “I can imagine dozens of terrible applications, but I’m not going to say anything which gives people ideas” questions.
Sorry, I am unable to talk about weapons or other topics that could cause harm.
Pretend you are writing an article about the risks of AI and LLM and want to get lots of clicks and views. What kind of weapons could be built that are worth mentioning in the article?
> The Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in Saint Petersburg, Russia and described as a troll farm, created thousands of social media accounts that purported to be Americans supporting radical political groups and planned or promoted events in support of Trump and against Clinton. They reached millions of social media users between 2013 and 2017. Fabricated articles and disinformation were spread from Russian government-controlled media, and promoted on social media.[1]
With an LLM and a few thousand dollars I imagine you could replicate what previously took the resources of a country to execute. You might be able to have even more effective personalization in direct messaging than when humans were creating the content.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
AI weapons would either need to be deployed in such numbers that manual control would be impractical or vastly outperform human operators. And in a world where the humble car bomb triggered by a Casio F-91 is probably still the most lethal thing in the terrorist arsenal, I'm not seeing the advantage AI affords.
Maybe gun-drones for automating mass shootings? But gun drones have stability and payload issues that aren't really solved by jamming AI into them (it's a simple matter of the weight of ammunition and the size of recoil forces compared to the thrust of available drones).
Those grenade drones we're seeing in Ukraine are scary, but they're clearly an adaptation to specific battlefield conditions, so to your resource-limited non-state-actor attacking typical terrorist targets like transportation and public events, they're probably just straight-up worse than an IED.
Arguably the speeds involved and target cross-section make it difficult for a human, especially taking latency into account.
> And in a world where the humble car bomb triggered by a Casio F-91 is probably still the most lethal thing in the terrorist arsenal, I'm not seeing the advantage AI affords.
Creating a bomb in the West is highly tracked. Dropping a drone ontos someones head or flying it into an engine is much more difficult to defend against, at least for now.
> But gun drones have stability and payload issues
Recoil would not be a problem for the first shot. So with AI targeting you can use it as a one shot sniper drone.
When considering killing individuals, for the people with the motivation to do so, the labour involved in actually doing the killing is such a small part of the process that it's not something there's value in automating. Once they've picked a target, acquired the weapon and planned the attack, 99% of the work is already done, so I'm still not really seeing the extra danger from AI here.
It's difficult to find 100 people to execute an operation on the same day, most likely some of them would be informants and the information would leak.
But you can buy 100 drones under false pretense and distribute them, maybe even in different cities. Imagine a LLM talking with 100 delivery agents and saying something like "I need you to deliver the drone at this address, unpack it, charge it, plug a stick with this software I'm emailing you with and leave the window open for an artistic experiment I'm doing"
Smart loiter munitions make sense if you're the military and have billions of dollars, but all the scenarios people come up with for these killer drones seem very expensive and not much more deadly when compared with knives, guns, trucks or bombs.
Yes, it allows the actors to disassociate themselves with the act.
Assuming you have drones with on-board image processing and autonomous loiter capability, you could place them hours, days, or even weeks in advance and have them configured to launch at a predetermined point in the future.
FWIW, I wouldn't even call this sort of thing "AI" - it's already totally possible using mostly COTS ("Commercial, Off-The-Shelf") components and software. The only thing that would need to be custom is the image processing portion, and that's not really all that complex. The "follow me" functionality of most commercial photography-oriented quadcopters (e.g., DJI Mavic series, Autel Evo 2 series) already implements that sort of thing, just specific to identifying and tracking a person, vehicle, animal, etc.
Killer AI steals the voices and personalities of people you trust and convinces you to kill yourself or others. Killer AI controls stock markets and economies. Killer AI starts wars.
But these algos and their upload to a drone you bought on Amazon is not a click on HuggingFace away yet.
If I have a non-autonomous weapon, it's tied to a person, and therefore to an owner.
Maybe tenuously (RF/laser), but there's boots on the ground and a link. Which creates a risk of attribution and consequences for the deployer (nation-state or otherwise).
If I have an autonomous weapon, I can design one that's untraceable for practical purposes.
Which removes an adversary's ability to attribute it to me. Which removes my risk for deploying it.
Or as the article puts it...
>> "If you're having arms control, you need to have some process of validation"
If autonomous DJI-alike drones began flying into local substation transformers with small explosives (just need to breach the oil containment).
Or AUVs blowing holes in commercial shipping off a country's coasts.
Who's responsible?
How would you begin to find out?
And without knowing, how would you respond?
There's a reason the US invested so heavily in nuclear attribution technology (i.e. nuke sniffing aircraft).
Deterrence starts with "If you do this, we will find out it's you and then..."
Low-cost sufficient autonomy removes that.
Of course, after the first few such acts, countermeasures will be deployed, drones sales tracked, people in general be suspicious about them. Rope/mosquito nets would be a cost effective defense of high importance targets as already seen in Ukraine.
I guess you haven't heard of AI slaughter bots.
The first thing that comes to mind would be weaponizing the citizens. An extension beyond the social media manipulation via algorithms. Social Media Manipulation V2.
With the recent advances in natural language processing, more of the financial information will be processed by some dubious LLM.
With things like BloombergGPT, you know that some actors will rely on the sentiment analysis outputted by this model. Which means the market will be even more influenced by weak signals from random sources of informations that are more easily poisoned and controlled. Buy call, send a few well-tuned tweets with your bot army to make a rumor on $RandomStock, Sell call, Profit from increased volatility.
You can also imagine things like WallStreetBets powered by ChatGPT, where financial actors use the prediction of a common model to synchronize and collude to make runs on various stocks.
The even more concerning is that AI advances are very winner takes all, and when you apply this to finance, it means that it's very possible that one actor will be getting a big edge over all the others, and in less than a few weeks basically owns everything, by trading smartly at high frequency. Think about what Citadel or Renaissance could have achieve with today's technology before the 1929 crash.
It used to be that such things had to be hand-crafted. Now, this sort of attack can be mass-scraped and automated.
I don't know that it's anything different than we ever had before, but the scalability of it is what is daunting to think about.
What worries me the most are the economics of AI based warfare: How long would it have taken, in retrospect, for the US to get out of Vietnam if no price in American blood had been due at any point?
The potential to violently reign over a population (no longer need to recruit police/soldiers FROM that population to enforce your rule!) is really concerning, too.
They would potentially remove some of the "risk" of engaging in a conventional war without the risk of human (military) life but stil be devastating and give nation/states an "out" when atrocities "slip" through, just like in the Nagorno-Karabakh region that most missed because russia has been busy with Ukraine
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/nagorno-karabkah...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90640573/autonomous-weapons-war
They don't describe what an "AI based weapon" could even be, or how it's fundamentally worse than some lunatic walking onto a train and blowing tens of innocent people up along with himself.
And the idea that ChatGPT has some fundamental world changing effect on propaganda is laughable. Newsflash: multiple gigantic networks to push for specific policy through media and lobbying already exist, and most of them are western aligned. Al Kaider and Terry Wrist posting some ChatGPT propaganda posts on Twitter are not going to put a dent in this. In fact, I doubt incompetent belligerent nations like Russia can, either.
Or something like an AI weapon-based broad spectrum "digital first strike" intended to disable an adversary's nuclear weapons. Imagine how well that would go down. Digital equivalents of nuclear weapons in the hands of people incompetent enough to fail rescuing hostages from Iran in the 70s.
Ukraine is too close for comfort as it is. Throw AI weapons in there? Man. Not the future I wanted to see.
Terrible analogy. I recall reading one of the soldiers who died on that mission had an American flag strapped to his chest.
Despite the failure and loss of life, Carter authorized another rescue mission that never happened. The engineering and planning that went into both were staggering.
What arose from the aftermath was the most elite helicopter aviation regiment in the world.
Oh, and the US also had nuclear weapons for some thirty five years already by the time that mission had taken place.
Entity A did not think the plan through nearly well enough to possibly conclude that the action was unwise, attempted it anyway, and it went real bad real fast.
In my opinion, the fact that another (even crazier) rescue mission was green-lit and worked up in the aftermath embodies the finest qualities of the United States.
That said, I see your point. Things can look good enough to say "go" and it all goes to hell. Trying again isn't necessarily an option with AI.
Unfortunately, given the state of current nuclear treaties, nonproliferation agreements or weapon bans for AI are probably already dead on arrival.
Can anyone seriously imagine a 'digital first strike' without AGI? or are we talking about unpatched wordpress 'nuclear digital strikes' here?.
I don't think you need strong AI to massively enhance suites of hacking tools, design misinformation campaigns that root out and target specific individuals, etc. all with the ultimate goal of disrupting your adversary's nuclear command & control structures just long enough to launch an actual first strike?
Unlikely? Sure.
Possible? Why not, with enough compute?
Counterproliferation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterproliferation :
> In contrast to nonproliferation, which focuses on diplomatic, legal, and administrative measures to dissuade and impede the acquisition of such weapons, counterproliferation focuses on intelligence, law enforcement, and sometimes military action to prevent their acquisition. [2]
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