Good News: A.I. Is Getting Cheaper. That’s Also Bad News.
“But what is harder to anticipate — and wrap our heads around — is all the less tangible ways that A. I.
is being integrated into our lives.”
The rapid evolution of A. I.
is creating new security holes.
On Tuesday, a group of artificial intelligence researchers and policymakers from prominent labs and think tanks in both the United States and Britain released a report
that described how rapidly evolving and increasingly affordable A. I.
technologies could be used for malicious purposes.
But there may be bigger concerns in less obvious places, said Paul Scharre, another author of the report, who had helped set policy involving autonomous systems
and emerging weapons technologies at the Defense Department and is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Researchers are also developing A. I.
systems that can find and exploit security holes in all sorts of other systems, Mr. Scharre said.
But at times, new A. I.
systems also exhibit strange and unexpected behavior because the way they learn from large amounts of data is not entirely understood.
In time, putting these pieces together — researchers call them dual-use technologies — will become increasingly easy and inexpensive.