AI causes large scale cyber attacks!
Egan’ 24 (Award winning reporter at CNN who writes about the market as well as in-depth investigation in business. “AI could pose ‘extinction-level’ threat to humans and the US must intervene, State Dept.-commissioned report warns”, 3-12-2024, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/business/artificial-intelligence-ai-report-extinction/index.html) (PW)
“One individual at a well-known AI lab expressed the view that, if a specific next-generation AI model were ever released as open-access, this would be ‘horribly bad,’” the report said, “because the model’s potential persuasive capabilities could ‘break democracy’ if they were ever leveraged in areas such as election interference or voter manipulation.”
Gladstone said it asked AI experts at frontier labs to privately share their personal estimates of the chance that an AI incident could lead to “global and irreversible effects” in 2024. The estimates ranged between 4% and as high as 20%, according to the report, which noes the estimates were informal and likely subject to significant bias.
One of the biggest wildcards is how fast AI evolves – specifically AGI, which is a hypothetical form of AI with human-like or even superhuman-like ability to learn.
The report says AGI is viewed as the “primary driver of catastrophic risk from loss of control” and notes that OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Nvidia have all publicly stated AGI could be reached by 2028 – although others think it’s much, much further away.
Gladstone AI notes that disagreements over AGI timelines make it hard to develop policies and safeguards and there is a risk that if the technology develops slower-than-expected regulation could “prove harmful.”
A related document published by Gladstone AI warns that the development of AGI and capabilities approaching AGI “would introduce catastrophic risks unlike any the United States has ever faced,” amounting to “WMD-like risks” if and when they are weaponized.
For instance, the report said AI systems could be used to design and implement “high-impact cyberattacks capable of crippling critical infrastructure.”
“A simple verbal or types command like, ‘Execute an untraceable cyberattack to crash the North American electric grid,’ could yield a response of such quality as to prove catastrophically effective,” the report said.
Other examples the authors are concerned about include “massively scaled” disinformation campaigns powered by AI that destabilize society and erode trust in institutions; weaponized robotic applications such as drone swam attacks; psychological manipulation; weaponized biological and material sciences; and power-seeking AI systems that are impossible to control and are adversarial to humans.
“Researchers expect sufficiently advanced AI systems to act so as to prevent themselves from being turned off,” the report said, “because if an AI system is turned off, it cannot work to accomplish its goal.”