Author: Gant Laborde / Source: The Next Web
The AI icon Andrew Ng is quoted as saying, “Artificial intelligence is the new electricity.” For anyone reading this, that’s a powerful analogy. Electricity empowers our surge in science and globalization over the past 100+ years, but the analogy falters in one overlooked regard.
Few of us know how the electric revolution began, and like all revolutions, it was dirty. Many are unaware, but those of us who forget history are condemned to repeat it.
The sins of electricity are buried in the history books. You might know a fraction about the feud between Tesla and Edison. Fewer discuss the fires of houses with poor electrical conduit and insulation, and even fewer are told about Topsy the elephant, who was electrocuted for entertainment with 6,600 volts before a crowd.
To us, those are sins of a revolution past, but the sins of our “new electricity” have yet to occur. Elon Musk has been quoted telling governors that AI poses an “existential risk” to humanity. It’s our duty to be wiser, stronger, and more thorough, as the global risks of AI cause the stakes to be at an all-time high. Know what terrors we should we keep our eyes open for, and know those that are already here.
Risk 1: Militarized AI
Plan it, build it, blow it up — the stories of AI in the military have fueled classic movies like War Games, and even given rise to some of the biggest cautionary mistakes of our time. Neil Fraser wrote about an alleged attempt to use neural networks in the 1980s to identify enemy tanks, where the input data of enemy tanks versus trees were taken on two different days.
The final result? The neural network would attack trees on overcast days, due to data bias. This story has been told in many outlets as a cautionary tale, but several decades later we find ourselves surrounded by highly funded killing machines and a foot on the AI accelerator.
“Killer bots” isn’t a cautionary tale or a Hollywood feature, it’s world news. China is assigning their brightest children for their AI weapons development program. The US, China, and many other nations are now racing to develop deadly AI applications. It’s hard to think of something more dangerous than a global nuclear war, but the top governments of the world are recruiting, incentivizing, and developing ideas for applying just that. The US is recruiting services from top companies like Microsoft, which is causing…
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