Submitted by Shaboda t3_zl0m8l in Futurology
telmar25 t1_j06l58c wrote
Reply to comment by Hangry_Squirrel in Why do so many people assume malevolent AI won’t be an issue until future AI controlled robots and drones come into play? What if malevolent AI has already been in play, covertly, via social media or other distributed/connected platforms? -if this post gets deleted by a bot, we might have the answer by Shaboda
My point is that AI doesn’t need to have any idea what it’s doing—it doesn’t need to have sentience etc.—to produce unexpected output and be very dangerous. Facebook AI only has the tool of matching users with news or posts. So I suppose the worst that can happen is that users get matched with the worst posts (sometimes injected by bad actors) in a systematic way. Bad enough. Give an AI more capabilities—browse the web, provide arbitrary information, perform physical actions, be controlled by users with different intents—and much worse things can happen. There’s a textbook (extreme) example of an AI being tasked to eradicate cancer that launches nuclear missiles and kills everyone, as that is the fastest cancer cure. Even that AI wouldn’t need to have sentience, just more capabilities. Note this does not equate to more intelligence.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments