Good A.i. Bad A.i

Story from the New York Times: Good News: A.i. is getting cheaper. That's also bad news.

But at times, new A.I. systems also exhibit strange and unexpected behavior because the way they learn from large amounts of data is not entirely understood. That makes them vulnerable to manipulation; today’s computer vision algorithms, for example, can be fooled into seeing things that are not there.

“This becomes a problem as these systems are widely deployed,” said Miles Brundage, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and one of the report’s primary authors. “It is something the community needs to get ahead of.”

The rapid evolution of A.I. is creating new security holes. If a computer-vision system can be fooled into seeing things that are not there, for example, miscreants can circumvent security cameras or compromise a driverless car.

Automated techniques will make it easier to carry out attacks that now require extensive human labor, including “spear phishing,” which involves gathering and exploiting personal data of victims. In the years to come, the report said, machines will be more adept at collecting and deploying this data on their own.

Some believe concerns over the progress of A.I. are overblown. Alex Dalyac, chief executive and co-founder of a computer vision start-up called Tractable, acknowledged that machine learning will soon produce fake audio and video that humans cannot distinguish from the real thing. But he believes other systems will also get better at identifying misinformation. Ultimately, he said, these systems will win the day.

To others, that sounds like an endless cat-and-mouse game between A.I. systems trying to create the fake content and those trying to identify it.

“We need to assume that there will be advances on both sides,” Mr. Scharre said.

If we base our financial system on ai / computer automated systems, does this leave it susceptible to failure?

Looking at bitcoin, cybersecurity around the cryptoexchanges, should we be concerned about the pace of A.i. and perhaps form an overzealous approach surrounding regulation and the rollout of fintech?