And then there is obscene "research" like this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v1.pdf "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images." How does stuff like this get past IRB?
Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
171–180 of 233 posts
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#172Earlier 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…
This made me think of a riddle I once heard recently from a high school student. "What is sexually transmitted, 100% fatal, and literally everyone you know is infected? ...Life."
Except life isn't sexually transmitted. There is no "receiver" of life in the sexual process.
Life is propagated through sexual reproduction.
There is also no "infection".
The joke, as told properly, is: "What is spread through sex, 100% fatal and literally everyone you know has had it?"
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#173Reading 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…
Here's the crux of the issue with respect to nuclear WMDs: In order to prevent citizens and other countries from creating nuclear bombs, our government severely limits access to relevant tools and materials, and actively seeks to censor the knowledge of how to build modern nuclear devices from other parties. In order to prevent citizens and other countries from creating dangerous rogue AIs, our government ___________…
This is the problem. WMDs take a lot of infrastructure and can be tested/inspected.
AIs can be built/modified by anyone in their basement. The genie can't be put back into the bottle. It's like trying to outlaw computer viruses and hoping that will work.
I don't have a solution :(
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#174I find it quite funny, rather intruiging, that we seem to have gone full circle on trusted sources of information. Historically, a face-to-face meeting was considered as the ultimate legitimate and trustworthy way. Not story or rumors or witnessing, since the courts say people can be "decieved", "traumatised", etc. Then came microphones, cameras, CCTV in the 20th century, and then they became the ultimate trusted sou…
> I'm saddened that there are actual "smart" people who waste their days to work on these malicious forms of AI, be it Google's almost entire arsenal, or anything. However, i'm not surprised they do, but it is still sad. Am sure the usual justification to apply salve to your conscience for this sort of activity is the trope that the 'bad guys' will do it anyway, so we need to do it before them to counter them and be…
AI with nukes is going to be fun...
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to most humans no, because while it may possess a mind, it does not have a soul and hence can be used and exploited. This is the argument we have given ourselves over millennia to use highly intelligent animals and of course human slavery was based on the myth that Africans were sub-human and slavery was good for them. Why do you think this time will be any different?
In the Roman empire they didn't even bother making a myth that their slaves were sub-human. It was simply a matter of might makes right: we conquered your nation so now we own you.
I think perhaps you're confusing Roman history with some other period of human history, perhaps on a different continent. In the Roman empire there were slaves who taught philosophy, slaves who managed large estates, etcetera, and people could both sell themselves into slavery and be freed from slavery. In fact, selling oneself into slavery was a popular route to becoming a Roman citizen.
If you don't want to read a history book, for which I wouldn't blame you, you might nevertheless enjoy Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy, which gives a fairly accurate impression of Roman society (or so claim many reviewers more competent than me). It's a truly amazing period of human history, when life was so modern in some ways, and yet so different from today in other ways, and the world was small enough for an individual to change the course of history.
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#176Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#177The disturbing thing about this paper to me - flashy though it may be - is what they left out rather than what they kept in. OpenAI appears to only be thinking of the crimes-against-individuals segment of malicious AI, rather then the crimes-against-humanity type of malicious AI that the surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI are building. I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones…
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,…
I'm sorry, but you're naive. The day might come when anyone with an 'X' in their online username is considered a threat. Ridiculous? Sure. But how about the things you've purchased? Schools/churches you've attended? Meetings you've gone to? Friends you have? The problem is when the definition of a threat changes, you can't go back and change your past, but are stuck.
Being a Jew in Germany in 1910 wasn't an issue. They had nothing to hide. In 1940 there was no going back for them.
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#178The disturbing thing about this paper to me - flashy though it may be - is what they left out rather than what they kept in. OpenAI appears to only be thinking of the crimes-against-individuals segment of malicious AI, rather then the crimes-against-humanity type of malicious AI that the surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI are building. I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones…
Who are the "surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI?"
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it could be frustrating, and maybe someone will not make that distinction. But either way, these are decisions that have to be made. What is your alternative to how the decisions are made? In the end, you are either leaving it to a human decision who is going to make a choice based on some heuristics and prejudice or an algorithm which is going to make a choice based on heuristics and prejudice. I'm not…
However, there is a differnce. If I dont get a job offer becuase I dont fit a humans biases of what they want. I can go somewhere else with a human that has differnt biases. The problem is with AI is how many googles are there? We will liekly end up with a handful of companies that rate you. Suddenly it does not matter where you apply for a job. If you did one thing that ruins/lowers these ratings you may not get a j…
Well, that's just part of the problem with the connected world. If you do something wrong it doesn't take machine learning or AI to find out, you just have to google it. Someone hiring you for a job will most likely do this anyways... I have had recruiters even call me out on such things. It has nothing to do with an algorithm.
It could be problematic if there was only one source of subjective information, especially if any perceived past transgressions were irredeemable. But if they are factual, do you have a problem with that? E.G, you go to hire somebody and find out that it's not recommended by hiring_hueristic_x based predominately on factors X,Y,Z (X being he stole from his past 10 employers, Y being he never held a job for more than 6 months, Z being he commonly posts serious threats about people he doesn't like online).
Also, do you have any idea what actually occurs when you make a decision? I don't. I would love to know someone who does. I still follow it.
Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm more concerned about Google using AI to mine every conversation I've ever had or my browsing history to classify me as a dissiden before I apply for a visa to travel to China or the United States, or as a deadbeat before I apply for a bank loan, or sick before I apply for insurance, or as unrehabilitatable before I apply for parole. I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either p…
> 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…
let me just call up the director of CIA and ask how frequently they use facial recognition technology to identify drone-strike targets in crowds.
Institutions have a long life. All the data collected today, too, will have an extremely long life. I am sure German Jews thought the census records, tax returns, synagogue membership lists, parish records that identified them as Jewish were harmless as well - until they weren't.
Suggesting that, amongst numerous possible scenarios of abuse, if there is nothing happening now then it has absolutely no potential for harm is an overwhelmingly ignorant position. Not to mention, the public would have absolutely no idea of such abuses even if they were happening.
But to actually answer your question, here is mobile malware [1] found by the lookout team that used 3 different vulnerabilities to complete compromise an iPhone all through a link opened in Safari. This allowed for applications that encrypt messages in transit, but not at rest on the device, to be compromised. Foreign governments used this malware to target investigative journalist and activists.
[1] https://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout-pegas...