How Artificial Intelligence Is Being Weaponized
What happens when AI becomes like a 1984 dictator?
I cover AI and future trends for a living. One overreaching theme I’ve noticed is how AI is being used not to augment people, but to weaponize their data against them. This is going to be a long read, and it's because I feel a bit passionate about this topic.
The debate over free-speech this week related to the Hong Kong protests signals no trade war resolution will take place since a cold tech war also is about information wars and basic freedom of speech.
As companies with billion-dollar market caps like Microsoft, Apple and Google cave into creating censorship products, we all lose and begin to enter a potential data-based Neo-Fascism era of control and surveillance.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves, this is LinkedIn, so let's talk about AI adoption more broadly.
Businesses across almost every industry deploy artificial intelligence to make jobs simpler for staff and tasks easier for consumers. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s also a dark side to this tech.
Indeed unbridled adoption of AI won’t just result in job losses, but data purgatory, and an internet that could begin to feel more like slavery, than education and freedom. It’s 2019, not 1984, but it might as well be.
AI is the “New God of Capitalism”
The surveillance state, increasing, is all I ever think about when I think of AI. I don’t have a Ph.D. in sociology but at this point, so much is being left unsaid and unregulated.
Google is becoming like China and the world is changing, and it’s not all for the better. Facebook is a tyranny and data points on our children will be oppressive. They will be ranked by AI and won’t be treated like people in the 2030s and 2040s. We won’t just be watched by robots, CCTV cameras in nearly all major global cities and an AI power that might as well be the new God of capitalism.
What we will witness in the future will make Facebook’s privacy invasions and third party data violations and political hacking look pretty soft.
Artificial Intelligence will become a tool for classifying and ranking people and what begins in the 2020s won’t end well for humanity. It’s not just the social credit architecture of China, it’s how AI isn’t being regulated with any forethought to how humans be will be treated in the future.
Facial recognition laws will become obsolete, regulatory bodies will fail and AI will outpace itself.
Our grandchildren won’t wake up one morning and say “the internet is not a free place”. Indeed they never gave that Tik Tok app permission to take their data. There’s no global body to actually give guidelines on what AI should be and should be used for.
In the 7th mass extinction, if climate change doesn’t get us first, it might actually be the descendant of the AI we are creating today. AI could be the ultimate exploit of how humans weaponize data against each other.
Between 2018 and 2019, organizations that have deployed artificial intelligence (AI) grew from 4% to 14%, according to Gartner’s 2019 CIO Agenda survey. This means AI adoption is still in its infancy but in the 2020s things will ramp up, and so will the abuses of the weaponization of AI.
Here I’m not just talking about cybersecurity vulnerabilities that will “work themselves out”. I’m talking about how billionaires, authoritarian states, tech executives and even capitalism itself incentivize using AI for profit but also against human good.
The weaponization of AI is sort of inevitable, as the misuse of any early technology, the dangers are immense.
What if you suddenly invented something that could do everything? Would it also be used for evil? Something that could recommend content, power chatbots, trade stocks better, detect medical conditions better than doctors, and even drive cars in a safer way than humans? That’s AI.
Welcome to the future, dear global citizens and netizens.
Speech recognition by 2022 reaches a mass of mainstream adoption. By then surveillance architectures in smart cities will be starting to realize that to keep up with China, we’ll have to copy elements of its social credit system. Ranking people isn’t a choice if you want to win the race to AI. Tech companies and the U.S. military don’t want to fall behind.
Even the most obscure and supposedly pragmatic uses of AI will have their fair share of abuses. AI will also make the wealthy richer. So what does Gartner think are the new uses of AI?
In a nutshell, these 8 AI-powered spokes below.
- AI Cloud Services — AI cloud services are hosted services that allow development teams to incorporate the advantages inherent in AI and machine learning.
- AutoML — Automated machine learning is the capability of automating the process of building, deploying, and managing machine learning models.
- Augmented Intelligence — Augmented intelligence is a human-centered partnership model of people and artificial intelligence working together to enhance cognitive performance, including learning, decision making, and new experiences.
- Explainable AI — AI researchers define “explainable AI” as an ensemble of methods that make black-box AI algorithms’ outputs sufficiently understandable.
- Edge AI — Edge AI refers to the use of AI techniques embedded in IoT endpoints, gateways, and edge devices, in applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to streaming analytics.
- Reinforcement Learning — Reinforcement learning has the primary potential for gaming and automation industries and has the potential to lead to significant breakthroughs in robotics, vehicle routing, logistics, and other industrial control scenarios.
- Quantum Computing — Quantum computing has the potential to make significant contributions to the areas of systems optimization, machine learning, cryptography, drug discovery and organic chemistry. Although outside the planning horizon of most enterprises, quantum computing could have strategic impacts on key businesses or operations.
- AI Marketplaces — Gartner defines an AI Marketplace as an easily accessible place supported by a technical infrastructure that facilitates the publication, consumption, and billing of reusable algorithms. Some marketplaces are used within an organization to support the internal sharing of prebuilt algorithms among data scientists.
Sounds pretty mundane, right?
AI in the 21st century catches up and overtakes the performance of people, but people don’t get any smarter.
These are only a small handful of the most trendy business uses and exponential uses of artificial intelligence, but what about the ones they don’t tell us about?
These are only a small handful of the most trendy business uses and exponential uses of artificial intelligence, but what about the ones they don’t tell us about?
An era of biometric and genetic data means once AI gets entrenched in healthcare, finance, and education, there’s no turning back. China is already at that point. Things go a bit slower in the United States, due to politics and people like Elizabeth Warren and those pesky socialist-leaning Millennials.
The term “artificial intelligence” is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. So what happens when AI gets so good at being itself it begins to make people obsolete? What happens when this occurs in the industry after industry like a tidal wave?
It’s not just the sense of being watched, it’s the sense of the inevitability of being overtaken.
At the moment, Western civilization hasn’t reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we’re likely to be “good” employees, “good” customers, “good” dates and “good” citizens. But how long will that honestly take? 10 years? 15? 20? It’s only a matter of time. We already judge each other based on Tinder swipes and Instagram accounts.
AI-powered systems are now being used to screen employees. China’s social credit experiment can take away your privilege to travel. All of these reinforcements and punishments in a world where AI is God — not as crazy as it once sounded.
AI, robotics and those “smart technologies” will create a society that will feel fundamentally less human. Human-centric or empathetic AI won’t be able to catch up to the more carnal and obvious misuses of AI, to obtain control and maintain power.
Google’s smart clothing will allow it to see what you do and where, and how you live. Got to give DARPA some props sometimes.
Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, had earmarked disused land in Toronto, Canada for this bold urban experiment, which it hoped would become a model for other cities around the world. Sidewalk Labs had a far grander vision than the 12 acres (48,500 sq m) site it had talked about. Toronto residents and onlookers are concerned that they are not getting transparency. You don’t say!
While many reports tout the benefits of AI, there are many risks and unintended consequences, including the likelihood of replacing millions of human workers and myriad unethical uses of the technology.
People are starting to realize algorithms, mobile addiction and the future exponential tech littered with AI might not actually be good for us. Google’s proximity to Huawei, China, and DARPA is, of course, a bit concerning.
But the lack of regulation in AI is, I think, the biggest concern for what an AI global net becomes. National rivalries and global capitalism drive a fierce implementation of AI that could feel like totalitarian fascist data slavery. I didn’t always believe this.
But as an amateur futurist, I’m starting to get worried.
People that work or used to work in Silicon Valley are starting to be concerned.
Onlookers of China’s surveillance net know what is coming.
Artificial intelligence is a super powerful tool and like any really powerful tool, it can be used to do a lot of things — some of which are good and some of which can be problematic. Without a safety net (real oversight) or ethical training wheels, AI will get dangerous in a hurry for groups of people and for our descendants.
The FTC has failed to regulate BigTech and China is moving ahead too fast now.
Global capitalism has been corrupted by its greed for AI products that harvest data and are used unethically.
When our biggest tech island states show a predisposition to abuse their power to dominate the future, how can AI be people-centric or benign? The two realities are incompatible.
What happens in Huawei, Google, Amazon or Alibaba doesn’t stay just in the customer base of those global titans. Their products will define a generation of how AI will be scaled globally.
China is using facial recognition to closely scrutinize its citizens who could be punished for certain transgressions. So what will happen to our children one day?
Everything we ever do, say, share online, every digital transaction could be used to profile us. Our genetic vulnerabilities mined, our talents mapped, our capabilities compared with others.
Society augmented with AI will be a vicious national competition of selection. It won’t just be a wealth class definition, but how naive we are to AI products, how “augmented” we are.
The world’s most advanced cities aren’t ready for the disruptions of artificial intelligence. If companies, countries, and governments are failing in AI regulation, so will cities.
The automation wave without the weaponization of AI would be nasty enough alone. The U.S. will be required to retool at least 11.5 million people in America with the skills needed to survive in the workforce. Millions of workers in Brazil, Japan and Germany will need assistance with the changes wrought by AI, robotics and related technology.
Computers, intelligent machines, and robots seem like the workforce of the future, while data and algorithms herd the unemployable peasants. That’s us, by the way. Don’t believe me, write your 2050 self a note.
AI is coming for you, your data, to augment you and also to classify you in ways you cannot yet even imagine.
➧Related reading: Why AI is Becoming Dangerous to Global Order.
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