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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 severel

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 _____________ What do you think goes in that blank?

DougN7 9y ago
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 :(
- kakarot 9y ago
  Perhaps this is the Great Filter. Nuclear war, societal collapse, supervirus... all these can come from rogue / misused AI
- AJ007 9y ago
  AI needs compute cycles. These are quite centralized outside of botnets. I’ve pointed this out before, but the primary commercial use cases of AI right now are malicious: mass population surveillance and behavior manipulation (ads; political and otherwise.) My biggest concern are the ML researchers who dismiss malicious use as being a distant concern while they work on projects that are malicious right now.
  - kakarot 9y ago
    Homomorphic encryption + cloud services + VPN chaining. If there's one thing that won't be in shortage for the foreseeable future, it's compute cycles. And I'm with you, the socioeconomic aspects of AI are far more important to curtail, but it doens't mean we should be ignoring the very real threat of people attacking infrastructure, sewage and power plants. And we shouldn't be waiting until after it's a problem, when it already can be seen as a certainty that it will happen eventually.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
The answer is regulating data - not algorithms or hardware - the data. I'm not saying it should happen, but if you want to regulate AI then you have to regulate the data that it learns from. That means strict rules on storage, retrieval, scale, uses of, collection etc... of images, video, text, metadata, EM emissions, really anything that produces a measurable "signature" of some sort. It's how we regulate nuclear [1] - the "source material" is the most important part, while the refineries, delivery mechanisms etc are secondary. Doing this would put serious brakes on the tech industry so I don't see anything close to this happening honestly. [1]https://www.nrc.gov/materials/srcmaterial.html https://www.nrc.gov/materials/srcmaterial.html
- kakarot 9y ago
  Are you serious? That kind of widespread banning of information is fundamentally incompatible with a democratic society. It's absolutely preposterous to think that I could prevent someone from downloading and using a database of pictures, EM emissions, basically anything that a government deems dangerous, via threat of State violence. That is as draconian and authoritarian as it gets. How do you even enforce such a law? You would need unrestricted access to every system. Otherwise, you are only harming legitimate researchers and enthusiasts, not criminals. Criminals are still going to access and download whatever the hell they want. How do we determine what can "help" AI and what can't? Is it the number of sources you have that should be restricted? Is there a committee that decides this? Are the proceedings open to civilian involvement? Who decides what is okay and what isn't? Can corporations or government organizations (military) apply for this data? Why can groups of people with lots of money and infrastructure have it, but not me? How does this prevent a further segregation of socioeconomic classes? Comparing nuclear "source material" to random data like images, video, metadata, etc is downright deceitful. If you aren't being purposefully deceitful, you really need to reflect upon exactly how such a law would be carried out, the logistics of its enforcement, and the limitations. It's a logistical nightmare and is infinitely more complex to enforce than it should be, not to mention downright anti-democratic. Damn right it shouldn't happen.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
eslaught 9y ago
There are really two kinds of attacks: ones that involve subverting existing networked devices to perform malicious acts (hacking), and making one's own malicious devices (building). Of the two, attacking existing devices sounds scarier because there is a large fleet of vulnerable existing devices that can potentially be exploited. However, of the two problems, it's also the one we know more about: it's basically straight up cyber security. The AI aspect is mostly a tangent, a way to control the system once you have access. It seems the most straightforward way to defeat these attacks is to increase their cost by promoting better cyber security (sandboxing, use of safer languages, cryptography as appropriate, etc.). That's not to say it'll be easy, but the problems are largely known problems. On the other hand, anything that involves the attacker actually building something themselves is either going to be much smaller scale, or is going to leave a physical trail that can be traced like we do for any other sort of weapons mitigation.
- e12e 9y ago
  I think it's a spectrum; or rather, weak and strong ai is a force multiplier : A hacked car is dangerous, many hacked cars are more dangerous, a pack of hacked cars more so. As is a hacked car that can hack other cars, and recruit them for the pack. Note this isn't hyperbole as such; we already have experience with computer viri and worms. It seems quite reasonable that a bot network might work semi-automously toward a "goal". In the same sense ants might "hunt" for sugar.

DougN7 9y ago

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 :(

kakarot 9y ago
Perhaps this is the Great Filter. Nuclear war, societal collapse, supervirus... all these can come from rogue / misused AI
AJ007 9y ago
AI needs compute cycles. These are quite centralized outside of botnets. I’ve pointed this out before, but the primary commercial use cases of AI right now are malicious: mass population surveillance and behavior manipulation (ads; political and otherwise.) My biggest concern are the ML researchers who dismiss malicious use as being a distant concern while they work on projects that are malicious right now.
- kakarot 9y ago
  Homomorphic encryption + cloud services + VPN chaining. If there's one thing that won't be in shortage for the foreseeable future, it's compute cycles. And I'm with you, the socioeconomic aspects of AI are far more important to curtail, but it doens't mean we should be ignoring the very real threat of people attacking infrastructure, sewage and power plants. And we shouldn't be waiting until after it's a problem, when it already can be seen as a certainty that it will happen eventually.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

The answer is regulating data - not algorithms or hardware - the data. I'm not saying it should happen, but if you want to regulate AI then you have to regulate the data that it learns from. That means strict rules on storage, retrieval, scale, uses of, collection etc... of images, video, text, metadata, EM emissions, really anything that produces a measurable "signature" of some sort. It's how we regulate nuclear [1] - the "source material" is the most important part, while the refineries, delivery mechanisms etc are secondary. Doing this would put serious brakes on the tech industry so I don't see anything close to this happening honestly. [1]https://www.nrc.gov/materials/srcmaterial.html https://www.nrc.gov/materials/srcmaterial.html

kakarot 9y ago
Are you serious? That kind of widespread banning of information is fundamentally incompatible with a democratic society. It's absolutely preposterous to think that I could prevent someone from downloading and using a database of pictures, EM emissions, basically anything that a government deems dangerous, via threat of State violence. That is as draconian and authoritarian as it gets. How do you even enforce such a law? You would need unrestricted access to every system. Otherwise, you are only harming legitimate researchers and enthusiasts, not criminals. Criminals are still going to access and download whatever the hell they want. How do we determine what can "help" AI and what can't? Is it the number of sources you have that should be restricted? Is there a committee that decides this? Are the proceedings open to civilian involvement? Who decides what is okay and what isn't? Can corporations or government organizations (military) apply for this data? Why can groups of people with lots of money and infrastructure have it, but not me? How does this prevent a further segregation of socioeconomic classes? Comparing nuclear "source material" to random data like images, video, metadata, etc is downright deceitful. If you aren't being purposefully deceitful, you really need to reflect upon exactly how such a law would be carried out, the logistics of its enforcement, and the limitations. It's a logistical nightmare and is infinitely more complex to enforce than it should be, not to mention downright anti-democratic. Damn right it shouldn't happen.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago

eslaught 9y ago

There are really two kinds of attacks: ones that involve subverting existing networked devices to perform malicious acts (hacking), and making one's own malicious devices (building). Of the two, attacking existing devices sounds scarier because there is a large fleet of vulnerable existing devices that can potentially be exploited. However, of the two problems, it's also the one we know more about: it's basically straight up cyber security. The AI aspect is mostly a tangent, a way to control the system once you have access. It seems the most straightforward way to defeat these attacks is to increase their cost by promoting better cyber security (sandboxing, use of safer languages, cryptography as appropriate, etc.). That's not to say it'll be easy, but the problems are largely known problems. On the other hand, anything that involves the attacker actually building something themselves is either going to be much smaller scale, or is going to leave a physical trail that can be traced like we do for any other sort of weapons mitigation.

e12e 9y ago
I think it's a spectrum; or rather, weak and strong ai is a force multiplier : A hacked car is dangerous, many hacked cars are more dangerous, a pack of hacked cars more so. As is a hacked car that can hack other cars, and recruit them for the pack. Note this isn't hyperbole as such; we already have experience with computer viri and worms. It seems quite reasonable that a bot network might work semi-automously toward a "goal". In the same sense ants might "hunt" for sugar.