Rory McNicol for Live Science
Many believe that the risks of an evolving artificial intelligence far outweigh the benefits. Do you think we should halt development in case it’s too dangerous for humanity to handle? There are many debates around artificial intelligence (AI) given the explosion in its capabilities, from worrying whether it will take our jobs to questioning if we can trust it in the first place………Continue reading…..
Source: Live Science
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Advanced AI could generate enhanced pathogens or cyberattacks or manipulate people. These capabilities could be misused by humans, or exploited by the AI itself if misaligned. A full-blown superintelligence could find various ways to gain a decisive influence if it wanted to, but these dangerous capabilities may become available earlier, in weaker and more specialized AI systems.
Geoffrey Hinton warned in 2023 that the ongoing profusion of AI-generated text, images, and videos will make it more difficult to distinguish truth from misinformation, and that authoritarian states could exploit this to manipulate elections. Such large-scale, personalized manipulation capabilities can increase the existential risk of a worldwide “irreversible totalitarian regime”. Malicious actors could also use them to fracture society and make it dysfunctional.
AI-enabled cyberattacks are increasingly considered a present and critical threat. According to NATO’s technical director of cyberspace, “The number of attacks is increasing exponentially”. AI can also be used defensively, to preemptively find and fix vulnerabilities, and detect threats. A NATO technical director has said that AI-driven tools can dramatically enhance cyberattack capabilities boosting stealth, speed, and scale—and may destabilize international security if offensive uses outstrip defensive adaptations.
Speculatively, such hacking capabilities could be used by an AI system to break out of its local environment, generate revenue, or acquire cloud computing resources. As AI technology democratizes, it may become easier to engineer more contagious and lethal pathogens. This could enable people with limited skills in synthetic biology to engage in bioterrorism. Dual-use technology that is useful for medicine could be repurposed to create weapons.
For example, in 2022, scientists modified an AI system originally intended for generating non-toxic, therapeutic molecules with the purpose of creating new drugs. The researchers adjusted the system so that toxicity is rewarded rather than penalized. This simple change enabled the AI system to create, in six hours, 40,000 candidate molecules for chemical warfare, including known and novel molecules.
Companies, state actors, and other organizations competing to develop AI technologies could lead to a race to the bottom of safety standards. As rigorous safety procedures take time and resources, projects that proceed more carefully risk being out-competed by less scrupulous developers. AI could be used to gain military advantages via autonomous lethal weapons, cyberwarfare, or automated decision-making.
As an example of autonomous lethal weapons, miniaturized drones could facilitate low-cost assassination of military or civilian targets, a scenario highlighted in the 2017 short film Slaughterbots. AI could be used to gain an edge in decision-making by quickly analyzing large amounts of data and making decisions more quickly and effectively than humans. This could increase the speed and unpredictability of war, especially when accounting for automated retaliation systems.
In the “intelligent agent” model, an AI can loosely be viewed as a machine that chooses whatever action appears to best achieve its set of goals, or “utility function”. A utility function gives each possible situation a score that indicates its desirability to the agent. Researchers know how to write utility functions that mean “minimize the average network latency in this specific telecommunications model” or “maximize the number of reward clicks”.
Do not know how to write a utility function for “maximize human flourishing”; nor is it clear whether such a function meaningfully and unambiguously exists. Furthermore, a utility function that expresses some values but not others will tend to trample over the values the function does not reflect. An additional source of concern is that AI “must reason about what people intend rather than carrying out commands literally”, and that it must be able to fluidly solicit human guidance if it is too uncertain about what humans want.
Assuming a goal has been successfully defined, a sufficiently advanced AI might resist subsequent attempts to change its goals. If the AI were superintelligent, it would likely succeed in out-maneuvering its human operators and prevent itself from being reprogrammed with a new goal. This is particularly relevant to value lock-in scenarios. The field of “corrigibility” studies how to make agents that will not resist attempts to change their goals.
Some researchers believe the alignment problem may be particularly difficult when applied to superintelligences. Their reasoning includes:
- As AI systems increase in capabilities, the potential dangers associated with experimentation grow. This makes iterative, empirical approaches increasingly risky.
- If instrumental goal convergence occurs, it may only do so in sufficiently intelligent agents.
- A superintelligence may find unconventional and radical solutions to assigned goals. Bostrom gives the example that if the objective is to make humans smile, a weak AI may perform as intended, while a superintelligence may decide a better solution is to “take control of the world and stick electrodes into the facial muscles of humans to cause constant, beaming grins.”
- A superintelligence in creation could gain some awareness of what it is, where it is in development (training, testing, deployment, etc.), and how it is being monitored, and use this information to deceive its handlers. Bostrom writes that such an AI could feign alignment to prevent human interference until it achieves a “decisive strategic advantage” that allows it to take control.
- Analyzing the internals and interpreting the behavior of LLMs is difficult. And it could be even more difficult for larger and more intelligent models.
Alternatively, some find reason to believe superintelligences would be better able to understand morality, human values, and complex goals. Bostrom writes, “A future superintelligence occupies an epistemically superior vantage point: its beliefs are (probably, on most topics) more likely than ours to be true”. In 2023, OpenAI started a project called “Superalignment” to solve the alignment of superintelligences in four years.
It called this an especially important challenge, as it said superintelligence could be achieved within a decade. Its strategy involved automating alignment research using AI. The Superalignment team was dissolved less than a year later. Observers tend to agree that AI has significant potential to improve society. The Asilomar AI Principles, which contain only those principles agreed to by 90% of the attendees of the Future of Life Institute’s Beneficial AI 2017
Assumptions regarding upper limits on future AI capabilities” and “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.” Conversely, many skeptics agree that ongoing research into the implications of artificial general intelligence is valuable. Skeptic Martin Ford has said:
“I think it seems wise to apply something like Dick Cheney’s famous ‘1 Percent Doctrine’ to the specter of advanced artificial intelligence: the odds of its occurrence, at least in the foreseeable future, may be very low—but the implications are so dramatic that it should be taken seriously”. Similarly, an otherwise skeptical Economist wrote in 2014 that “the implications of introducing a second intelligent species onto Earth are far-reaching enough to deserve hard thinking, even if the prospect seems remote”.
AI safety advocates such as Bostrom and Tegmark have criticized the mainstream media’s use of “those inane Terminator pictures” to illustrate AI safety concerns: “It can’t be much fun to have aspersions cast on one’s academic discipline, one’s professional community, one’s life work … I call on all sides to practice patience and restraint, and to engage in direct dialogue and collaboration as much as possible.”
Toby Ord wrote that the idea that an AI takeover requires robots is a misconception, arguing that the ability to spread content through the internet is more dangerous, and that the most destructive people in history stood out by their ability to convince, not their physical strength.
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