I know some of you are Trekkies, and even if you aren’t a fan, you’ve more than likely heard the phrase, “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile,” chanted by Star Trek’s hive-mind aliens, the Borg. Though they pale in comparison to some of the movies and series’ most iconic nemeses like Khan and the omnipotent Q, their constant drive to absorb beings and technology to improve the collective are proving to be hauntingly prescient when compared to certain modern-day companies seemingly bent on assimilating the internet to feed the AI beast.
“I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Borg.”
When the Borg appeared for the first time on Star Trek in 1989, repulsion to their “otherness” came from our culture’s inherent dislike of the concept of individuality and freedom being made subservient to a collective will. While AI was not new to science fiction at the time – it had already become infamous decades before in the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey – it was viewed as something maybe possible in the distant future. Luckily, we got Y2K instead of HAL when the new millennium rolled around, but now, just 20-ish years later, we are faced with the reality of web-crawling bots hoovering up everything on the internet to fuel “large language model” AI platforms. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to the Borg in this regard. Human content creators are already having to resort to legal measures against various companies for “assimilating” their original work into AI-generated copycat products that are being sold on platforms like Amazon (a company often compared to the Borg) or appearing in YouTube videos (another very Borg-like company), or in sound-alike songs on Spotify.
“We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.”
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Image by PIRO from Pixabay
The FBI held a press conference last week to confirm what we figured was already a thing the moment open-source AI projects started surfacing: threat actors are using artificial intelligence to write malware, build ransomware websites and to put more teeth in their phishing campaigns. And as if we didn’t need more nightmare fuel, the FBI also shared this little nugget: terrorists groups are using AI to research deadlier “projects” like more potent chemical attacks.
If you can dream it, you can build it.
Unfortunately for us, dreams aren’t limited to those of us who are just trying to make our way through life without hurting anyone while having some fun along the way. Criminals aren’t hampered by ethics or compassion, and neither are AI’s, even when the programmers try to put in safeguards. As I’ve always maintained, anything built by humans will be subject to our flaws, and I don’t know that I’m willing to trust that any AI that becomes self-aware will be able to differentiate between good and evil with the amount of garbage we have piled onto the internet. At this point, unless you happened to be a multi-billionaire with ethics and a hotline to folks in power, the best you can do is let your congress-critter know that we should be pumping the brakes on this runaway AI truck. While there have been some relatively feeble attempts from the established technology titans to put together something akin to a digital watermark that will help the rest of the world identify content created by an AI, there are probably hundreds of throne-contenders willing to ignore the rules for a chance at the top, humanity be damned, and you can bet that many of them already have their hands in the pockets of any government powerful enough to even try to regulate this technology.
Am I saying it’s time to start looking for bunker-friendly real estate in an under-developed country with robot unfriendly terrain? Not yet, but could we confidently say we would know when that moment has arrived, or maybe we’ve already crossed that threshold. Most of us can only cross our fingers and hope the future is more like Star Trek and nothing like Terminator.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The news is aflutter with Artificial Intelligence bots doing things like writing job descriptions, college essays, passing Bar exams and apparently various other menial tasks that we humans would clearly rather have someone else doing, especially if that someone else doesn’t need to get paid, or at least paid a living wage. Both Microsoft and Google have announced their intentions to include AI in their business platforms, and while some of the things people have had AI do are pretty nifty, we also seem to be conveniently forgetting or at least disregarding the consequences of letting technology do everything.
“I’ll be back.”
Terminator is probably an extreme example of AI gone horribly awry, but we can already see faint echoes of a future where we become complacent about machines replacing humans across all aspects of our lives. Sure, it is nice that technology can assist with the dangerous, dirty and banal tasks, and for it to augment our capabilities in things where our physical bodies limits us, such as space exploration or virology or disabilities, but once it starts replacing things we should know how to do (even if not as well as a machine), we are placing a dangerous amount of trust in something that can (and will) fail. The most common manifestation of this is how most humans handle password management. We rely on technology to remember and automatically enter passwords for us on everything, including the most critical services such as email, banking apps and even the password management platform itself, and as a result, don’t remember any of them, or even realize that a password is required at all.
As a simple test of how vulnerable you might be to this over-dependency, if you imagined yourself being sat down in front of a brand-new phone or computer, would you know how to get access to something like your email, or your bank account, or even where your passwords are stored? If even imagining this scenario is triggering your fight or flight response, you might be relying on technology too blindly. There is a fine line between allowing technology to augment our capabilities as humans versus replacing basic skills that everyone should have in a rapidly evolving world. No AI spam filter in the world will beat well-trained common sense and skepticism. Using technology and our humanity together is the difference between utopia and dystopia.
Image courtesy of Geerati at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Confirming something that many of us already suspected, Twitter has revealed in its most recent SEC filing that almost 9% of all Twitter accounts aren’t used by actual humans. Given the social media’s 271 million accounts, that’s nearly 23 million Tweeters posting content at the behest of some form of automation or algorithm.