I’ve been keeping up on all this AI rogue-agent stuff and it kind of scares the mess out of me. Should I be really, really afraid or only slightly afraid?
The shortest answer I can give—and I dearly wish it were the most reassuring one—is that AI development is in some ways like the atomic bomb. These are imperfect comparisons but I don’t think they’re incorrect statements for either technology:
- It could be extremely destructive
- The underlying technology can be used in incredibly beneficial ways
- Anyone might have be able to make it or steal it or use it
- The fallout from widely destructive use of it could end up damaging whoever deploys it
- Because of that last point, we have to think most people won’t want to do that much damage with it because they know
- Aaaaaand we regular people can’t really do anything about it so it’s pointless to spend a lot of time worrying about it.
There are, of course, many, many ways that the two dangers are entirely unlike each other: AI agents are more likely to be deployed in smaller ways that wouldn’t constitute war, or even a crime.
Saying here and now, for the recent incidents such as the one involving Hugging Face, both OpenAI and Anthropic should absolutely be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I hope their punishment is swift and strong enough to make them more careful, and less reckless, selfish, arrogant idiots.
It’s true that any of us might be affected by an inadequately restrained or maliciously deployed AI agent. But to me, it seems more likely that these intrusions, these automated hackings, won’t spread beyond a single target, and would be more inconvenient to the target than to its constituents (e.g. to a company than to its customers). That’s not to say that if, say, the Social Security Administration were hacked and people weren’t getting their checks, it wouldn’t be an awful situation, but we’d find a way to recover. Probably.
All that said, my read on all the recent public statements—by the tech executives and by the computer scientists who have been speaking out against them—is that they are all self-aggrandizing, self-serving, and self-promoting, and I’m tired of it. The executives, especially, who are calling for “slowdowns” and regulation, are only trying to hold back their competition, who are numerous and will continue charging forward regardless.
So…worry? There’s a lot to worry about. Put it on the pile. In serious, paying generally good attention, and sticking to personal security protocols such as I talk about with all of my clients, is all we can do.
Finally, and only a little tangentially, I have to recommend this interview with the excellent, brilliant, and hilarious Cory Doctorow, who gives some beautiful high-level summary of the whole landscape of this stuff.
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