18-04 The Dark Side

“Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal”. “I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” These chilling lines from 2001: A Space Odyssey expressed the quintessential fear we have of AI running amok. It’s hard to tell if this scenario is science fiction or something that could happen sooner than later. Let’s focus on a few examples and what might well morph into the dark side.
1) Training machines was a task started by young white men from Silicon Valley and other key tech centres. While image recognition is now very advances, there was that legendary example of Google Photos that initially classified black people as “gorillas”.
2) These days’ machines train themselves with humans becoming a secondary factor. For example when AI was developed to play the complex game of “GO”, two AIs played thousands of games between themselves– then analyzed and corrected the logic for moves when they didn’t win. The Dark Side is that we often get lost in this scenario since we don’t know exactly what the machines know.
3) Autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems that are programmed to kill. In the wrong hands these weapons could easily cause mass casualties. And to avoid being thwarted by the enemy, these weapons would be designed to be extremely difficult to simply turn off. So, humans could plausibly lose control of such a situation. The risk is one that’s present even with narrow/targeted AI, but grows as levels of AI intelligence and autonomy increase and broaden. (https://futureoflife.org/background/benefits-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/).