<story><title>The best defense against malicious AI is AI</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608288/ai-fight-club-could-help-save-us-from-a-future-of-super-smart-cyberattacks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bem94</author><text>Depending on ones level of idealism, the best defense against malicious AI is actually educating programmers &amp;#x2F; hackers &amp;#x2F; engineers on the implications of their work and to have a sense of decency &amp;amp; foresight.&lt;p&gt;It baffles me that we just accept the kind of malice inflicted on people by programmers because &amp;quot;someone will always do it&amp;quot;. As a profession &amp;#x2F; collection of skilled persons, we should really be better than that.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, one cannot see the future, nor would we want to be paralized by fear of doing anything. But there is a certain minimum requirement for collective responsiblity which I really don&amp;#x27;t think we are meeting at the moment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bad_alloc</author><text>Decency and foresight is highly subjective. Actually encoding what we understand as &amp;quot;decent human behaviour&amp;quot; into AI is a huge problem: If you create a system that decides about giving somebody a loan in the US based on a financial data set it might come up with any of these hypotheses:&lt;p&gt;* Don&amp;#x27;t give loans to people living in [poor area].&lt;p&gt;* Avoid people with names that aren&amp;#x27;t similar to the most common ones in the database (i.e. foreign ones)&lt;p&gt;* When linking the customer data to their social media and you see the picture is dissimilar to [preferred ethnicity], do not give a loan.&lt;p&gt;Now without any malice from the developer, the system has become racist: It saw the correlation that in the US blacks and hispanics live in poverty more often that others [1]. It knows that poor people pay back loans less frequently and makes the rational decision to not give a loan to that group. This of course reinforces the problem.&lt;p&gt;But how are we to solve this? Introduce an additional column &amp;quot;race&amp;quot; to the data and bias the results with it? Would that not be just as racist? How do we give the system an awareness not to discriminate against ethnic groups, if the data contains implicit clues? This comes down to giving such an AI human intuition about such questions.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ssc.wisc.edu&amp;#x2F;irpweb&amp;#x2F;faqs&amp;#x2F;faq3&amp;#x2F;Figure1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ssc.wisc.edu&amp;#x2F;irpweb&amp;#x2F;faqs&amp;#x2F;faq3&amp;#x2F;Figure1.png&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The best defense against malicious AI is AI</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608288/ai-fight-club-could-help-save-us-from-a-future-of-super-smart-cyberattacks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bem94</author><text>Depending on ones level of idealism, the best defense against malicious AI is actually educating programmers &amp;#x2F; hackers &amp;#x2F; engineers on the implications of their work and to have a sense of decency &amp;amp; foresight.&lt;p&gt;It baffles me that we just accept the kind of malice inflicted on people by programmers because &amp;quot;someone will always do it&amp;quot;. As a profession &amp;#x2F; collection of skilled persons, we should really be better than that.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, one cannot see the future, nor would we want to be paralized by fear of doing anything. But there is a certain minimum requirement for collective responsiblity which I really don&amp;#x27;t think we are meeting at the moment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>The problem is that if engineers in the US don&amp;#x27;t take the job then someone somewhere in, say, Asia will. Ethical rules are not the same everywhere. You can already tell this by looking at experimentation with stem-cells, cloning, et cetera, which is happening faster in Asia than in the US because of regulations.&lt;p&gt;Also, refraining from building these systems means that other countries get ahead of us. Besides being an economic disadvantage, this could also threaten security.&lt;p&gt;So I do agree that engineers should adhere to ethical guidelines, but they should be considered in a global context.</text></comment>