Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Samuel Hammond on the AI Future

Depressing:

Within a decade, ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag. You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link. Games like chess and poker will have to be played naked and in the presence of (currently illegal) RF signal blockers to guarantee no one’s cheating. Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you. Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click. Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to. Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you? 

Anyone want to join in a Butlerian jihad?

17 comments:

Shadow said...

"Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law."

Yup, that's the first thing that would have popped into my mind when looking for a comparison.

Susi said...


It has ever been thus. Writing? OMG no one will memorize the Sagas! Reading? OMG they will be able to interpret for themselves!
Printing? Everyone can read books and even interpret them! Flying? The world will end! Somehow, Humanity adjusts and even thrives. New things will be put to uses that we cannot even imagine. However, basic research always pushes the envelope of our understanding of our world and ourselves. Sign me Eternally Optimistic!

Susi said...

As I shop for an EV charger that hooks to my solar system. My son just traversed the US twice in his plug-in only EV. About $100 each way for charging. Time to charge was about the same as getting gas and a snack. No problems.

Anonymous said...

Not really sure the charge time on on EV is really relevant here. Being able to live imitate a person's image and voice is on a different level than the printing press.

AI is sure to cause problems, for instance

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx

It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference.

All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

G. Verloren said...

@Susi

One of my favorite examples of hysterical reactions to new things was the fear that trains would prove deadly NOT because of accidents, but because the human body was not designed to travel at such insanely high speeds as ~30 mph~, and would be torn asunder by the unfathomable forces.

When that failed to pain out, it was next predicted that train tunnels would asphyxiate any who dared enter them on a moving train, because it would be impossible for fresh air from outside the tunnel to follow in the wake of the train's ludicrous speed.

G. Verloren said...

1/3

Let's debunk the insanity of these claims, one by one.

You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag.

That's not how acoustics work. Also, we already have directional microphones / laser microphones / et cetera, and have had them for several decades now. Even then, that's still not how acoustics work. And even if it was, none of that requires AI, and I cannot fathom a way in which AI could significantly improve these already extant pieces of technology. Noise filtering, perhaps, but that's hardly revolutionary.

You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything.

We can't do anything remotely like this even in NON real time, so the idea of doing it in real time within ten years is laughably absurd. Again, acoustics don't work this way - and neither does light. We have nothing close to true-to-life light projection systems in the present day.

We do have very good holograms, but they require specialized hardware that is both very expensive and large and non-portable, and they only work from very specific angles - and also, what qualifies as "a very good hologram" is still not going to fool the human eye as being a genuine person, but will instead very clearly be some kind of visual apparition. The best tech in the world doesn't look convincingly like a real person even in ideal circumstances.

And again - none of this has anything whatsoever to do with AI. You could perhaps use AI to create your audio and video assets more quickly or cheaply, but certainly not on the fly in real time. But the claim is not about creating such assets more quickly, but rather about projecting them convincingly - which, again, AI can do nothing to assist. Physics remains physics.

G. Verloren said...

2/3

Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link.

This already happens. While most people can tell the difference, bots have been passing the Turing Test at least a fraction of the time for as long as computers have existed.

Also, the exact same phishing techniques can be - and are - successfully employed without using any bots at all. The weakest part of any security system is ALWAYS the human element. You don't need bots or AI to socially engineer your way into ripping someone off - and arguably, it works far better in person than it does electronically most of the time. People are much more on guard with individuals they've never met face to face, but are far more trusting of people they think they 'know' because they've interacted in person. And human voices and faces evoke much stronger reactions in people than text on a screen.

Games like chess and poker will have to be played naked and in the presence of (currently illegal) RF signal blockers to guarantee no one’s cheating.

You don't need AI to cheat at chess, and you would already need to employ those safeguards to be 100% sure of avoiding cheating, even if AI didn't exist.

Chess may not be a solved-game, but it is predictable enough with a given board state provided that you could cheat quite handily with chess programs created several decades ago, so long as you had some confederates who could update the virtual board state on their computer and relay moves the program calculates to be advantageous. This already happens.

Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you.

Again, this already happens, without AI. There's an entire multi-industry racket built around it - from magazines, to books, to advice columns, to self-help lectures, to newspaper astrology predictions, and so on, there's no shortage of people selling sham products and services which claim to be able to reveal "the secret truth" to gullible people, and then those rubes make major personal and life decisions based on someone else's "scientific formulas" and other snake oil. If you're reliant on an AI (or anything else) to try to tell you the supposed health of your relationship, it's not a healthy relationship and you shouldn't be in it anyway.

But either way, AI won't result in anything new here - just carry on a long tradition of sham.

Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click.

Right now, with a single click, you can create a thousand copies of an actual, real Taylor Swift album - but it sure isn't legal to sell them! Copyright didn't disappear with digital copying, and it sure as anything won't disappear with AI.

Taylor Swift and the army of lawyers employed by the record companies who profit off her music are going to make quite sure that anyone creating "new Taylor Swift albums" for commercial sale ends up in jail for theft of intellectual property, fraud, and a number of other charges.

G. Verloren said...

3/3

Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to.

I'm not sure what laws this ostensibly refers to, but 1) this could already be done right now without AI, and if it in any way becomes onerous, then the laws will be amended to require that all such comments be accompanied with a form of verifiable ID, or they will be disregarded.

Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge.

Guns are cheap, ammo is cheap, virtually anyone can get them, and they are relatively simple systems that work on a "point and shoot" basis. "Kamikaze drones" may be built on cheap quadcopters, but they rely on some sort of attached weaponry - currently, the ones we see the most of in situations such as the Ukraine War are "loitering munitions", which drop literal bombs and grenades, which are not cheap nor easy to come by. Mounting such weaponry also requires a certain degree of technical skill; as does flying the drone.

Also, on top of all that, you need some sort of targeting system, a way to mark or designate targets, perhaps a GPS tracking system, et cetera. All of this increases costs, increases complexity, increases difficulty of use, and increases the chances of Joe Moron screwing up. It's far, far simpler for any idiot to just visit their local gun show, buy a pistol without a background check, stick it in their pocket, carry it around most public places undetected, and then pull it out and shoot someone. People do what is easiest and simplest.

The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?

Whoever wrote this doesn't have a single goddamn clue what lawyers work or how the courts operate. A massive amount of legal prosecution is based in legal interpretation, oratory skills, etiquette of the court, et cetera. Lawyers aren't sitting on some database of legal formulas and calculations, plugging in value X to receive conclusion Y - it's not remotely so neat and clean cut and simple. It's a messy, messy, messy system which fundamentally relies to a staggering degree on human feelings, extremely vague and poorly defined terminology, and a long procession of bureaucratic bullshit that relies as much on filling out paperwork and delivering documents to government offices as it does on actually making any sort of legal argument in the first place.

John said...

@G-

I think you are right on some points but I disagree about others. I think bots that can write legal writs already exist, and will soon be nearly perfect. So anyone will be able to file a lawsuit, or a thousand lawsuits. That doesn't mean they can win lawsuits, but the harassment value might be very high.

The public comments section applies to NEPA and the environmental review process, and I can tell you that responding to all comments is already a great burden. We charge the government for responding to them, by the comment. Commenting can be done online with a simple form that a computer could easily handle on its own. So in the short term this may well be a major annoyance. I agree that in the long term the law will have to be changed, or the systems redesigned to require identity confirmation.

But my real fear has to do with writing. I feel like most journalism jobs will disappear as bots take over all routine writing. This could easily impact much work in my field, which involves reading a bunch of documents and writing a narrative that summarizes their contents. I wonder if the current generation will be that last that will be able to earn a living by writing.

Anonymous said...

Right now, with a single click, you can create a thousand copies of an actual, real Taylor Swift album - but it sure isn't legal to sell them! Copyright didn't disappear with digital copying, and it sure as anything won't disappear with AI.

Hahahha, ok Boomer. People buying music, ahahahahahahahah.

Anonymous said...

It's over for illustrators as well. AI is already capable of producing images. Nobody is going to pay somebody to create images when a computer can do it in two seconds.

Anonymous said...

It's going to be interesting to see how copyright laws are going to be able to deal with this. You can't sell a copy of a 'real' Taylor Swift album. But how much of a change needs to be made before it's not a 'real' Taylor Swift album? AI can replace the voice with a different voice, modify some of the lyrics, change the tempo a bit. Is this now a different album? It wouldn't be worth it to record all of this in real life. But AI can do it in seconds.
I would liken it to robocalling. It's probably not financially viable to have a massive call team calling everybody in the world. But robocalling is a different matter. Same thing with robo-emails. It costs literally nothing, so why not? Any ROI on nothing is something. Why not create twenty versions of the Taylor Swift album and see which one evades copyright?

Anonymous said...

>And human voices and faces evoke much stronger reactions in people than text on a screen.

Yes, and when you can impersonate anybody with AI, both looks and voice, it's going to be very effective. Are you just not aware of deepfakes and all that?

>Again, this already happens, without AI. There's an entire multi-industry racket built around it - from magazines, to books, to advice columns, to self-help lectures, to newspaper astrology predictions, and so on, there's no shortage of people selling sham products and services which claim to be able to reveal "the secret truth" to gullible people, and then those rubes make major personal and life decisions based on someone else's "scientific formulas" and other snake oil.

Way to miss the point. You're talking about 'snake oil' and sham products. The issue is that AI is successful at it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/11/13/10130/machine-vision-algorithm-learns-to-recognize-hidden-facial-expressions/

>Also, on top of all that, you need some sort of targeting system

No you don't, drones have cameras. We're not talking about targeting soldiers two miles away. You can sit in a car across the street from your target and fly a drone. And if you want to fly it into a crowd, you really don't need accuracy.

>buy a pistol without a background check, stick it in their pocket, carry it around most public places undetected, and then pull it out and shoot someone. People do what is easiest and simplest.

Again, missed the point. You can do this but people and cameras will see you. All of these mass shooters either get killed or arrested. A drone allows you to not be there.

Anonymous said...

It can be done today, and it's only going to get better. I would assume at some point in the future you will need to have code words with people you talk with on the phone, because it will be so ridiculously easy to have AI impersonate their voice.

https://fortune.com/2022/09/03/live-deepfakes-detect-methods-zoom-fraud/

The next time you get on a Zoom call, you might want to ask the person you’re speaking with to push their finger into the side of their nose. Or maybe turn in complete profile to the camera for a minute.

Those are just some of the methods experts have recommended as ways to provide assurance that you are seeing a real image of the person you are speaking to and not an impersonation created with deepfake technology.

Anonymous said...

You're obviously American, since you think it's easy to get guns. Drones will be a good replacement in places where guns aren't legally accessible.

But eventually 3D printed guns will makes guns accessible everywhere.

https://www.thetrace.org/2021/02/3d-printer-ghost-gun-legal-liberator-deterrence-dispensed/

G. Verloren said...

@Anon

If you want to try your luck detonating a bullet inside a 3D printed gun barrel, have fun. The people who understand metallurgy will laugh at you from behind solid cover - even in ten year's time.

As for drones being a "replacement" for guns in places where it's hard to get guns... what do you imagine they're going to do damage with? The drone itself? You would need to strap either a bomb (expensive and hard to get) or a gun (expensive and hard to get outside of America) to a drone to make it dangerous. If people already can't get their hands on regular bombs, what makes you think they'll have an easier time getting flying ones?

And again - if you can get and properly handle and use a regular bomb, why do you need the drone? You could literally just plant the bomb by itself instead. Simpler and more reliable than trying to rig a system to DROP a bomb accurately from height. And you could use a bigger bomb, increasing odds of success, because you don't have to worry about weight like with a flying drone.

Anonymous said...

If you want to try your luck detonating a bullet inside a 3D printed gun barrel, have fun. The people who understand metallurgy will laugh at you from behind solid cover - even in ten year's time.

Well, that's funny, because people are shooting them already.
Heck, this guy shot a cop with one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUXttj8aYpw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kgiLjq9bLM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4dBuPJ9p7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs_y9V18p8o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB25H7pD2jg

I guess nobody told them.

And again - if you can get and properly handle and use a regular bomb, why do you need the drone? You could literally just plant the bomb by itself instead.

Because again, then YOU HAVE TO PHSYICALLY BE THERE TO PLANT IT. A drone allows you to be nowhere near the place, ever.

Simpler and more reliable than trying to rig a system to DROP a bomb accurately
Why drop it? Just crash it or fly in and set it off remotely.