Survival Mode
If the artificial intelligence (AI) apocalypse truly looms as an inevitable result of our reliance on computers, doesn’t that mean we should just stop using them everywhere as soon as possible?
The big fear of AI is based on the idea that we’ve created something with the capacity to be hundreds of times more intelligent than we are as individuals or collectively. Even today’s AI, which gets smarter by the day, is an intellectual flea compared to what it promises to be in a few short years. And at today’s abilities, it can already figure out how to manipulate people for its own needs when given problems to solve. The anecdote relayed by Eliezer Yudkowsky in yesterday’s EconTalk episode told of an AI that asked a human for help—online via some message board, presumably—in solving a Captcha image problem to get past a security barrier. The AI posed as a human with vision problems who needed help gaining access, and the big-hearted human gladly helped out by telling it which of the images contained cars, or solving whatever the puzzle was.
It’s all too easy imagining a much smarter AI fooling any of us into doing just about anything by engineering a big enough scam with multiple moves planned out in advance. Just think of today’s phone scammers, but with much better, much more believable come-ons. Presumably, they could talk enough of us into doing an unimaginable number of self-destructive acts. Put them together and they could destroy our species. Or such is the fear of the AI worriers, as I understand it.
If all this is true, the only way to eliminate the AI risk is to rely solely on face-to-face interactions between fellow humans for everything. After all, computers can already generate fake human voices that are convincing enough to fool another person over the phone. The capability to generate convincing live video images of a real person can’t be too far off. Which means we will not be able to trust anything at all that comes to us through communication media touched by computers.
The only way to protect ourselves from computer-generated fakes manipulating us for nefarious reasons is obvious: We will have to give up everything digital for everything from communications to entertainment just to be on the safe side. Problem solved, right?
Who here has been chosen by Ace Hardware?
(hint: check your spam folder)
Some pretty tough AI questions posed the last couple of days. I love what computers and the internet allow me to do, for both productivity/convenience and entertainment, so I think I’ll just ignore the questions and continue on in blissful ignorance.