a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3720 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Technium Whispering to Itself

Claimer:

My father built the first network the Department of Energy ever had, and spent 30 years managing computer security for, among others, NEST.

You're mistaken.

There's this pervasive idea about "the Internet" that somehow, a million webcams, a billion Bluetooth receivers and a trillion audio DA chips will arise out of the digital muck and choose to wipe out humanity. It's positively Frankensteinian. Let's take it back a notch:

I am in my house, with my wife and daughter, right now. I live in Los Angeles, one of the most fragile cities in the world. There's a phone in my pocket, an iPad on the table, a network-connected receiver, a hub, a Wii, a Mac, a PS3, a printer, a Kindle and a weather station all connected to the Internet. That's just in this room.

Out there, malevolently dwelling in the aether, is a superintelligent AI. It wishes to do me harm. How is it going to do that, exactly?

Let's give it a leg up and pretend that my two Roombas are connected to the Internet. Now it's got mobility. Pretend it can wake them up and send them rolling… for my toes. OH SHIT MAD ROOMBA.

Maybe I go into the gear room where I've got 36 internet-connected faders. I try to mix and OH SHIT FADERS ATTACKING MY FINGERS.

I've got more "internet" in my house than any given seven people (we didn't really get into it) and I'm a long, long way from "Maximum Overdrive." There's a step most people miss in the whole "Skynet" scenario - the part where we wire up all of our killing toys for autonomy for some completely unknown reason. Reality check: it takes more people to get a Reaper UAV in the air and keep it there than it takes to do the same job with an F-15E Strike Eagle.

And the Eagle can carry nukes.

The entire scenario you're talking about is basically a malevolent version of Conficker, which mostly exists to lift credit card numbers these days. Which would be one thing if our Malevolent AI could wear all the slippers and bling it's buying with stolen credit card numbers, but as it doesn't even have the rudimentary waldoes to plug additional USB cables into itself, you'll excuse me if I find your predictions to be naively alarmist.





rob05c  ·  3720 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I wasn't defending the idea of a strong AI arising "out of the muck." Only that any strong AI, however it arises, will not die easily.