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As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoSecurity needs to catch up, the fact that IP addresses, caller ID among other ideas can be faked shows that we have a long way to go to improve peoples ability to validate the identity/security of communications.
- daveguy 10y agoAgreed. This "criminal AI" tack is pure fear mongering. One of their biggest points was solving human computer voice interaction so you could use it for automated social engineering. If you solved that problem you would command Gates/Musk/Bezos levels of wealth from the legitimate applications.
- Joof 10y agoAgreed. Social engineering is pretty difficult when you consider all the nuances you need to understand to accomplish it well.
- bananarepdev 10y agoTrue, but when it becomes almost inexpensive, it will pay off even with a low success rate. You would be impressed with how simple some social engineering schemes are.
- nitwit005 10y agoI'm not sure they'd bother even if it becomes available. 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.
- daveguy 10y agoCall center and labor costs. Labor is a huge part of any endeavor. Of course this "AI to human speech interaction" tech would be good enough to pass two levels above a Turing test (fool a person into believing a program, using voice and with enough nuance to impersonate a specific person or tight range of verbal nuance -- grandmas with regional accents). If someone had this and they're using it for scams then they would quite possibly be the worst business mind to ever live.
- vinchuco 10y agohttps://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-text-that-covers-the-entire-English-phonetic-range https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-text-that-covers-the-entire... It may not require much sampling to impersonate someone's voice based on these constructs.
- hellofunk 10y agoYou replace "Artificial Intelligence" in this title with nearly anything, and it will remain true.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- skewart 10y agoTrue. It's not a very good title. "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?
- gdubya 10y agoAs criminals evolve, so does their criminal potential!
- hueving 10y agoWell turtles may evolve to figure out how to steal food from grocery stores.
- pmontra 10y agoThey are apparently good analogies but they break because of the difference in scalability (maybe not for the turtles...) 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?
- kordless 10y agoAs AI evolves, so does our government's potential to abuse it to remain in control.
- Noseshine 10y agoI'm actually fine with the government(s) remaining in control. I would fear the alternatives a lot more.
- nurettin 10y agoAs the number of chandaliers grow, so do their criminal potential.
- rms_returns 10y agoIndeed, we haven't got any single positive or altruistic implementation of anything remotely representing AI yet. 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!)?
- Animats 10y agoI'm more worried about corporations run by machine learning systems optimizing for shareholder value. Somebody with access to YC's data should try training a classifier to predict YC success. How far away is the first VC fund run by a machine learning system?
- feelix 10y agoYC do use machine learning on applicants to predict success already. They don't listen solely to it, but they use it as one of their ranking signals to use google terms.
- dharma1 10y agoInteresting. What metrics? Has it worked so far?
- hueving 10y agoEthnicity, gender, religion. It's okay because a computer is doing it. /s
- chronic6l 10y agoYeah, we're not allowed to use high signal attributes because it tells the truth and makes people feel bad. Might as well select people randomly since they won't work for it...
- lordnacho 10y agoIf they tell you that it might not work so well. There's a saying about good measures ceasing to be so when they become targets.
- stevetrewick 10y agoAny observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes Goodhart's Law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- blahi 10y agoI am at a point where I feel the need for an addon that blocks everything that mentions "artificial intelligence". STOP already! There's no such thing. There won't be such thing. You have 0 idea about what you are talking about.
- geromek 10y agoAI is the biggest hype of the moment. It reminds me the film "Eagle Eye" (2008) where a kind of of Zeroth-law empowered AI wants to assassinate the president of the US. Despite its incredibly intelligence what I found more unrealistic was its control of all internet-connected systems in the US (traffic, remote control drones, phones, different OS, etc) "just because I am an AI and I can do whatever I want" 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.
- greggman 10y agoTo play devil's advocate. Let's say in 2030 we can fully simulate a human brain and it works. Let's also assume it runs 10000x faater than wetware (a highly conservative estimate?). That means in about 1 yr it should be able to assimilate as much info and experience as a 30yr old human. After that it could use it's 10000x speed advantage to effeftively have the equivalent of 10000 30yr old hackers looking for exploits in all systems. 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.
- Beltiras 10y agoGeneral AI like that is not years or decades away. The problem hasn't even been stated clearly yet. AGI is probably a century away or more. It's not a resource problem, it's a problem problem. I attended an AGI conference a couple of years back with the luminaries of AGI attending (held at my alma mater, University of Reykjavík). The consensus was we didn't even know which direction to take.
- andai 10y agoSo... I dont want/need to think about this cause I'll be long dead? :) On a related note, how optimistic are you about life extending medical technology (which is likely to be accelerated by even minor advances in computing and AI)?
- deftnerd 10y agoTime for extrapolation, brain storming, and irrational views of the future. 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.