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Ask HN: How is AI actively a threat to humanity if it's only online?

3•CM30•40m ago
That's always been something that's left me confused here. Yes, an AI can be dangerous by hacking websites and company systems or flooding social media with scams or fake news. Yes, AI generated code can have security issues that a developer doesn't catch because they didn't review it properly.

But isn't there a pretty big jump from that to "can destroy humanity"? Like say, a jump involving a society not run by the internet?

Because if an AI takes over the systems at a factory, it can't really do much beyond what the factory could already do. The production lines use single purpose robots and machines to build a particular product, and can't be programmatically altered to build anything else.

So, what exactly could a super intelligence even do with access? Only things I can picture are using it to try and hack another online system or speeding up/slowing down production rates.

Similarly, I hear a lot about these systems taking over weapons or releasing bio-engineered viruses or what not, and my first thought is "how?"

These systems are not accessible via the internet. There's no API endpoint that can launch nuclear weapons or set up a drone strike via a POST request.

To me, it feels like all these apocalyptic scenarios only make sense if a percentage of humanity gets manipulated by AI into doing its bidding, or if humanity suddenly invents easily hackable intelligent robots with an internet connection.

Comments

andsoitis•38m ago
> Because if an AI takes over the systems at a factory, it can't really do much beyond what the factory could already do. The production lines use single purpose robots and machines to build a particular product, and can't be programmatically altered to build anything else.

China’s Massive Robot Army is Shocking the Entire World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXoNZwIMy8A

Or what about Boston Dynamics https://bostondynamics.com/products/atlas/

benoau•13m ago
> Because if an AI takes over the systems at a factory, it can't really do much beyond what the factory could already do.

That can be enough, eg stuxnet. And like stuxnet they don't need to connect directly to the machinery themselves for a payload to breach them they just need someone to deliver the payload for them. And the machinery might be decades old, the software might still be Windows 95.

9x39•9m ago
>These systems are not accessible via the internet.

How would you know? Are you verifying them? SCADA systems weren't intended to be online, but that didn't stop critical infra for power plants, etc. to show up online. The convenience is too great to not try to remotely maintain them 'securely' & the assurance of airgaps is technical and expensive to get right.

Besides, are you considering the addition of modern AI to these 'offline' systems - factories, power, national weapons? You can get frontier models in a fraction of a rack today, who knows tomorrow. The organizations running these systems want in on the technological possibilities of AI, too.

Not to be a doomer about all this or anything, but there's a lot of evidence technologically superior entities dominate technologically inferior ones. So our home countries are in a Red Queen's Race to keep up, which is why adding "local" or "offline" AI to these systems seems probable. Again, airgaps are hard to maintain. It is within the realm of possibility that what's offline today is accidentally or intentionally networked tomorrow.

CM30•3m ago
Yeah that's a fair point. Best practices and actual practices sadly don't seem to correlate that much in the real world.

As far as security is concerned, things like hospital equipment, traffic control signalling systems, weapons arsenals and bioengineering medical labs should not be connected to the internet and should be designed in such a way that a human is required in the loop at all times. And shouldn't use AI to function in any way.

But yeah, fair point that a lot of organisations will ignore that in favour of "look how easy internet access makes controlling this thing" or "AI is so cool", forgetting how badly it leaves them at the mercy of their enemies (AI or otherwise).

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