Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#101

Post by tudelo » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

seren wrote: post #75

tyrex2017 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont share your concerns at all. my daily feelings and activities wouldnt change, whether facebook and google know about them or not. Contrast that to being killed by a drone. privacy concerns is rather an interesting intellectual problem, and not a real one. if it was a real problem, people would change their use of those tools but they dont. you can argue that loss of privacy allows corporations to manipulate us,…

Some every day scenario, with an impact, * You apply for a loan, it is refused * Your admission, for you or your children, to a school or university is refused because more worthy people have applied * Your job application is refused, All because of a fuzzy social score, that is mined from your contacts, activities on social network, meta data gathered from your smartphone in an opaque way, CCTV cameras, etc I mean i…

Doesn't the vast amount of data we have allow for things like getting a loan without knowing a guy? As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad? And why should an employer not use information easily accessible to them to determine the character of a potential employee when they only can have brief correspondence via interviews? I'm not sure if you're talking about future implications or what but it seems like this is the system that we exist in today. I don't think most of these decisions are based on a "fuzzy social score" though. At least not the topics you brought up.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#102

Post by book_mentioned » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

nyolfen wrote: post #99

ynniv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "best" part is how good an AI would be at privilege escalation. Go ahead, build out that security camera network, automate your cars, store your money using cryptography. I'm a geek and I love the way technology increases our collective prosperity, but most of our security relies on the attackers being approximately as smart as any other human. To a sufficiently capable intelligence, encrypted machine code is jus…

this comment is incoherent

My takeaway/TL;DR: OpSec is harder vs. AI (ever-vigilant pattern matching) than humans.

But it did drift into discussing a more offensive AI than passive monitoring done today.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#103

Post by 3pt14159 » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

Reading the comments on this article make me realize how unserious most engineers and software developers are taking this.

These threats are real.

The weaponization of everything is actually happening. Since I wrote about it a month ago (Self-Crashing Cars) a number of people have reached out including people with actual insight into the military aspect of it. Militaries around the world are getting ready for true AI enabled weapon systems and there building deterrence strategies for mass casualty cyber attack (including nuclear weapons response), whether its from hacked industrial plants or cars it doesn't matter. They're actually talking about the weaponization of cars at the Munich security conference.

We need to stop burying our head in the sand and write to our politicians about this threat. I know it sounds crazy but it's real.

As an aside, my main complaint about the people that truly understand this the inability / unwillingness to accept that the act of subverting systems capable of mass destruction via cyber attack amounts to cyber weapons of mass destruction. We need to assemble all the work / treaties / regulations / research we put into securing nukes into securing AI / robotics and for the identical reasons. We know how this ends otherwise. We need wide-spread government funding and we need to communicate what these things are in language that our governments understand. Not saying something that is true just because it sounds weird is counterproductive.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#104

Post by jeffreyrogers » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

It's nice to see a discussion of AI risk that addresses concrete scenarios. A lot of the forecasted doom (in other reports) resorts to handwavy arguments, but rarely goes into specifics. The examples they've given[0] seem plausible enough to me (except the persuasive ads one).

[0]: Persuasive ads, vulnerability discovery and exploitation, hacking robots (this one is only tangentially AI related), and AI-augmented surveillance.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#105

Post by tree_of_item » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

nyolfen wrote: post #99

ynniv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "best" part is how good an AI would be at privilege escalation. Go ahead, build out that security camera network, automate your cars, store your money using cryptography. I'm a geek and I love the way technology increases our collective prosperity, but most of our security relies on the attackers being approximately as smart as any other human. To a sufficiently capable intelligence, encrypted machine code is jus…

this comment is incoherent

Why? It's pretty simple, if we computerize everything a future AI is going to have more leverage over the world. If you believe Cory Doctorow when he says that everything is a computer, then everything is vulnerable to future AI.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#106

Post by seren » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

tudelo wrote: post #101

seren wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some every day scenario, with an impact, * You apply for a loan, it is refused * Your admission, for you or your children, to a school or university is refused because more worthy people have applied * Your job application is refused, All because of a fuzzy social score, that is mined from your contacts, activities on social network, meta data gathered from your smartphone in an opaque way, CCTV cameras, etc I mean i…

Doesn't the vast amount of data we have allow for things like getting a loan without knowing a guy? As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad? And why should an employer not use information easily accessible to them to determine the character of a potential employee when they only can have brief correspondence via interviews? I'm not sure if you're talking about future implications or what but it s…

I am talking about a future that is already being built today, piece by piece. I am well aware we are already judged with multiple bias, in a an opaque way. But this is not systematic, hopefully Employer A can have different bias than Employer B.

For me, the dystopic part would be to have a single, automated source of "truth", like the Sesame score, used everywhere.

It means that everything becomes easy or difficult because of that score. Suddenly you cannot rent or at higher price, your insurance rate will increase, it is harder to get a job...

Optimistically, in theory, it could make people "better", but who decides what "better" or "worthy" means ?

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#107

Post by sethgecko » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #39

mwaitjmp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one feature a blockchain excels at. People have stored the Bitcoin white paper in the blockchain. Anyone can then download it, and verify it is the untouched original.

You don’t really need the huge overhead of a block chain for that. You just need a hash and some redundant storage.

And to trust the guy who is storing the hash?

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#108

Post by taneq » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

tree_of_item wrote: post #71

edanm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A super-virus that has a 100% mortality rate, is incredibly infectious, and stays dormant for 1 year before killing the host. There's a fiction (I literally just made it up). Is it impossible to say anything about it? A bomb that is 1,000 times for powerful than a nuclear weapon. Again, currently science fiction. Can't say anything about that either? The fact that it doesn't exist right now doesn't mean we can't say…

A "superintelligent" AI that is to a human as a human is to a fly. Is it impossible to say anything about the world after it's been built ? Yes . It's not the fact that it doesn't exist, it's the fact that not only is it not clear that it's even physically possible, anything you come up with can just be handwaved away by this mystical property known as "intelligence". Your two examples don't have this problem so they…

> Is it impossible to say anything about the world after it's been built?

Well, actually no. It's possible to say one thing (and as far as I'm aware, only this thing): You'd better have an even smarter friendly AI on your side, or you're almost certainly boned.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#109

Post by Eridrus » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

TremendousJudge wrote: post #85

Eridrus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either people don't care, or already accept it's happening and inevitable. I have yet to see much in the way of concrete harms from the supposed privacy issues plaguing online advertising. Everyone has a favorite hypothetical situation where Google dobs you in to the Chinese government, but no evidence that anything of the sort is actually happe…

Here's a simple one that you can try at home. This isn't one of those 'the facebook app listens to me' privacy breaches, it's more concrete and provable. Take a friend you haven't talked to in a couple of years, and start chatting with them over WhatsApp. After some days of this, go to your Facebook feed and watch how their posts now appear prominently, even though they didn't before you started chatting. This is sim…

My point is specifically that these things are harmless, and everything else is purely in people's imaginations.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#110

Post by kypro » Thu, Feb 22, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #96

kypro wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem manifests in different ways though. I'm not so concerned about obvious violations of privacy like the one you mentioned, because it's so obvious that they are wrong. Let's say you tweet some anti-American stuff from time to time and the US government decides they want you to stop. They probably won't put a bullet in your head, but they might dig up information on you and arrest you for something totally u…

Martin Shkreli wasn't targeted by the government for prosecution. Shkreli got the max sentence for a crime he committed because he was out spoken about how he was not remorseful his crimes, nor did he show any capacity to even understand the seriousness of his actions. He also encouraged others to commit crimes for him during his sentencing. Judicial discretion isn't always perfect, but enforcing the max on an obviou…

I'm not arguing this. My point is simply that they wouldn't have gone after him if he didn't surrounded himself in controversy. What he did happens all the time, but unlike many others his outspokenness exposed the corruption and greed which occurs daily in our economic system.