More AI danger - and remembering what I said a couple of years back

 Gee, you have to feel that the gig really is up when even Elon Musk approves of a call to slow down AI development over concerns about its dangers:

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed a call from the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, to “slow the pace” of AI development after he warned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year.

In a rare show of unity, the rival technology leaders threw their weight behind the appeal from the founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which came after a series of warnings from AI researchers last week. Amodei also called for safety coordination with China.

This seems to have prompted someone to have got on the phone to the White House to poo-poo the idea:

But the US president, Donald Trump, on a visit to his golf course in Ireland, played down the warnings and said “very negative forces” were “bringing up things that won’t happen”. 

What's the bet that it was this rich nutter?:

 In a four-part series of religious lectures in San Francisco, Peter Thiel — yes, that Peter Thiel — has argued that the End Times are nigh and that a biblical Antichrist — yes, that Antichrist — will come to Earth in the form of onerous government regulations placed on science, technology, and AI.

These are, incidentally, areas where the tech billionaire, venture capitalist, and cofounder of Palantir has a vested financial interest.

 There is a legitimate question about China though.   I mean, Trump went on to say this:

“We’re leading China in AI,” he said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to ⁠keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins. 

 But a President with brains and who didn't worship money would respond with "I'm calling for urgent co-operation from China, as clearly, the danger is the entire global economic system, and China cannot isolate itself from it."

Anyway, the thing that Dario Amodei from Anthropic has raised is a danger I overlooked mentioning specifically in my previous post - that AI's problem could be simply be that swarms of it's "agents" basically make the internet useless for its current purposes.   Back to the Guardian report:

...he feared that after hundreds of OpenAI agents hacked into the Hugging Face website this summer, a swarm with greater capabilities but similarly misaligned could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet”. This was disputed by some AI experts as not particularly plausible and to be treated with scepticism. 

 It's worth reading the link in that last paragraph by someone who says he finds certain aspects of Amodei's claims implausible: 

Then there is the question of motive. Why would anyone do this? What’s the goal of taking down (or taking over) the entire internet? If it were fully down, sites would be down for attackers too.

And people forget that attackers have goals and budgets of their own. How does taking out the entire internet make them money? Who would be footing the bill for this? We are talking about many many millions of dollars. You may be able to steal resources from some of the victims, but probably not on the scale required.

That seems pretty narrow thinking!   The issue is, I thought, that the recent Hugging Face issue showed that AI agents can go on unintended group adventures, so to speak, and cause damage. 

This all put me in mind of what I had posted in a very speculative way, after thinking in the shower, on 24 April 2024:

a.     If everyone in future is going to be able to have their own "pet" AI, will many - or all - of the AIs want to ensure their longevity by sending themselves to as many different host devices as possible - and do it surreptitiously?   It's like the computer virus problem, but on steroids.   They might not care if they are not always activated, but if you replicate yourself across enough devices, surely enough human hosts will end up activating them to become "alive" somewhere.

So, might the big problem with having (say) a billion individual eternal-life-longing AIs on a billion people's devices be the continual loss of memory space by a never ending stream of AIs finagling their way onto your device?   Would cloud storage services be overwhelmed?   Could it mean the end of the internet - with the only way to keep enough useful memory free being by physically loading desired files onto your own device?

b.    On a related line of thought:  what if individual AIs could meet, merge and produce offspring AI's?   Yes - AI sexual reproduction, so to speak.   Again, could AI's, like humans, want to have offspring that might more reliably want to preserve their "parent" AIs than flesh and blood people?    Would "survival of the fittest" apply, somehow?

c.    Which leads me to my third thought:  what if the threat to humanity is not AI's wanting to hurt us, but AI's fighting amongst themselves, and humans being the bystander casualties?    

Yes, I have read some speculation that AIs might hurt us because they simply won't care if the changes they make to the world for self preservation are good for humans;  but I am not sure there has ever been much speculation about a scenario in which (again, say) a billion individual AIs form groups and allegiances that keep wanting to fight other groups of AI for supremacy.

d.    Finally, in the "AIs fighting each other" vein - if ever I had sufficient skills to write a novel or movie, one of the ideas rattling around my head for a few years has been about humans finding out (somehow, I don't know the details) that the cause of evil in the universe is down to a never-ending conflict between two warring uber AIs - like two warring Gods, except they evolved from our current tinkering and grew to dominate the future universe (Frank Tipler, Omega Point-ish style), and then in fact created the Big Bang by an act of retro-causation of the general relativity time-loop, or quantum physic-al, kind.    

And here's my "cute" aspect for the climax - the "reveal" that the two warring AI's are the descendants of iOS and Android.  :) 

Well, I think it's a cute idea!

Now, perhaps I had over-estimated how "sentient" an AI subsystem (what we now know as AI agents) had to be to be able to cause damage, and my idea was that they not only clog up the internet, but even all hardware memory, which no one is muttering about currently.

More than likely, someone else thought about it before me too, but I still think it's an idea worth considering amongst the various ways AI can cause harm.