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100-Page Report Warns of the Many Dangers of AI (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: Last year, 26 top AI researchers from around the globe convened in Oxford to discuss the biggest threats posed by artificial intelligence. The result of this two day conference was published today as a 100-page report. The report details three main areas where AI poses a threat: political, physical systems, and cybersecurity. It discusses the specifics of these threats, which range from political strife caused by fake AI-generated videos to catastrophic failure of smart homes and autonomous vehicles, as well as intentional threats, such as autonomous weapons. Although the researchers offer only general guidance for how to deal with these threats, they do offer a path forward for policy makers.
Did you read the summary?
The dangers they are outlining don't need thinking systems. This is about a quantum leap in what we could do with computers until now (and with what costs) - effortlessly creating fake videos, photos, voice recordings and twitter posts, more troublesome botnets etc. These don't need sentience, but it is chaos all the same. They are not talking about computer overlords taking over, but about what malicious human actors can do with the new tools. For instance, bots that do more precise sentiment analysis and classification to push posts that favor a government's position - we are all effected at some level by what we consider to be the public consensus, especially it is an issue we don't have a deep understanding of.
When Internet first began, security concerns were minimal. Only the technical and academic elite cared and were largely well-behaved in their communities. As it became democratized, it became necessary to be cautious about everything. Who needed a firewall or a spam filter in the beginning? People trusted any executable they downloaded. A consumer was not worried about patching their systems regularly.
Same thing now. So far, AI (let's just call it advanced statistical learning, if you are finicky about the term AI) has been largely used for benevolent and creative purposes. As the use grows, that won't be the only way it will be applied.
No need to worry. Anyone with the skills - which are hardly difficult to acquire - can cook up ML in their basement, garage, warehouse, dorm, wherever. When actual AI comes along, same thing. It's just a matter of the right code. Even if people have relatively low-end hardware, that just means they will have relatively slow ML/AI; after all, if you pass a problem requiring intelligence to solve it and it's handed back a minute later, or two days later, with the same, correct answer - you still have the same AI. Just slower. At which point it can be distributed and better hardware applied.
There is simply no way, as in absolutely none, to stop this kind of technology within the bounds of people still owning general-purpose computers. And we already have them, so the cat is well and truly out of the bag.
As the technical level advances, so will ML, and as ML advances, AI will certainly pop up at one point or another. There's no doubt about it, unless you think brains are magic rather than [chemistry/electricity/topology] (and if you do, you're going to be very surprised at some point, although you'll have a period of illusion during which you can be calm, just like the one when people thought airplanes were impossible.)
In any case, don't worry about politicos and academics bloviating about "restricting" ML/AI. Can't be done. That ship has sailed.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.