A friend sent me a video today. It started off rather innocuously, with a program called EarWorm, designed to search for Copyrighted content and erase it from memory online. As many of these stories do, it escalated quickly. Within three days of being activated by some careless engineers with no backzground in AI ethics, it had wiped out all memory of the last 100 years. Not only digitally, but even in the brains of the people who remembered it. Its programmers had instructed it to do so with as little disruption to human lives as possible, so it kept everyone alive. It might have been easier to just wipe humanity off the map. Problem solved. No more Copyrighted content being shared, anywhere. At least that didn’t happen. Right?
This story is set in the year 2028, only ten years from now. These engineers and programmers had created the world’s first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and it rapidly became smarter than all of humanity, with the computing power and storage capacity surpassing what had been available previously though all of human history. Assigned a singular mission, the newly formed AGI sets out to complete its task with remorseless efficiency. It quickly invents and enlists an army of nanoscopic robots that can alter human minds and wipe computer memory. By creating a mesh network of these bots that can self-replicate, the AI quickly spreads its influence around the world. It knows that humans will be determined to stop it from accomplishing its mission, so it uses the nanobots to slightly alter the personalities of anyone intelligent enough to pose a threat to its mission. Within days it accomplishes its task. It manipulates the brains of its targets just enough to achieve the task while minimizing disruption. It does this by simply reducing the desire of the world’s best minds in AI to act. It creates apathy for the takeover that is happening right in front of them. By pacifying those among us intelligent enough to act against it, its mission can proceed, unencumbered by pesky humans.
Because it was instructed to accomplish its task with ‘as little disruption as possible’ the outcome isn’t the total destruction of humanity and all life in the universe, as is commonly the case in these sorts of AI doomsday scenarios. Instead, EarWorm did as it was programmed to do, minimizing disruption and keeping humans alive, but simultaneously robbing us of our ability to defend ourselves by altering our minds so that we posed no threat to its mission. In a matter of days, AI drops from one of the most researched and invested-in fields to being completely forgotten by all of humanity.
This story paints a chilling picture (though not as chilling as many ‘grey-goo’ scenarios, which see self-replicating, AI-powered nanobots turning the earth, and eventually the entire universe, into an amorphous cloud of grey goo). It is a terrifying prospect that a simple program built by some engineers in a basement could suddenly develop general intelligence and wipe an entire century of knowledge and information from existence without a whimper from humanity.
How likely is it? Do we need to worry about it? and What can we do about it? are some of the questions that sprang to mind as I watched the well-produced six-minute clip. It is a scenario much more terrifying and unfortunately, more plausible than those of popular TV and films like Terminator and even Westworld. There are a lot of smart people out there today who warn that AI, unchecked, could be the greatest existential threat faced by humanity. It’s a sobering thought to realize that this could happen to us and we wouldn’t even see it coming or know it ever happened.
Then, the real question that the video was posing dawned on me: Has this already happened?
We could already be living in a world where AI has already removed our ability to understand it or to act against it in any way…
I hope not, because that means we’ve already lost.
Here’s the video if you’re interested