Here is what would really happen if an AI tried to wipe us out

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Here is what would really happen if an AI tried to wipe us out

 

 

In Hollywood films, when artificial intelligence goes rogue, it usually leads to armies of marching, merciless machines and a few plucky humans battling in the ruins.

But what would really happen if an AI tried to wipe us out?

 

AI scientist Eric Horvitz gathered many experts at Arizona State University – with funding from Tesla’s Elon Musk – to work out.

 

The scientists tried to work out how AI might wipe us out – while another team tried to work out how it might be stopped.

 

Scenarios involved a rogue AI targeting self-driving cars, or attempting to swing elections (a bit too close to reality, that one) but one scenario was particularly chilling.

 

Researchers including Kathleen University of the computer science department at Tufts University discussed the idea of an intelligent computer virus – designed to hide itself, and spreading across the internet.

 

Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords.

 

Veteran AI scientist Eric Horvitz and Doomsday Clock guru Lawrence Krauss, seeking a middle ground, gathered a group of experts in the Arizona desert to discuss the worst that could possibly happen -- and how to stop it.

 

Blue team, including Launchbury, Fisher and Krauss, in the War and Peace scenarioTessa Etzioni, Origins Project at ASU

 

Their workshop took place last weekend at Arizona State University with funding from Tesla Inc. co-founder Elon Musk and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. 

 

Officially dubbed "Envisioning and Addressing Adverse AI Outcomes," it was a kind of AI doomsday games that organized some 40 scientists, cyber-security experts and policy wonks into groups of attackers -- the red team -- and defenders -- blue team -- playing out AI-gone-very-wrong scenarios, ranging from stock-market manipulation to global warfare.

 

Horvitz is optimistic -- a good thing because machine intelligence is his life's work -- but some other, more dystopian-minded backers of the project seemed to find his outlook too positive when plans for this event started about two years ago, said Krauss, a theoretical physicist who directs ASU's Origins Project, the program running the workshop. 

 

Yet Horvitz said that for these technologies to move forward successfully and to earn broad public confidence, all concerns must be fully aired and addressed.