5 Reasons Why Artificial Intelligence Will Take Over the World

Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are growing at an unprecedented rate. These technologies have many widely beneficial applications, ranging from machine translation to medical image analysis. Countless more such applications are being developed and can be expected over the long term.

In the past, not enough attention has been paid to understand and evaluate the ways in which Artificial Intelligence can become a threat to human life.

A new report titled “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation,” authored by 26 experts from 14 institutions, including the famous Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Elon Musk’s OpenAI, The Information Society Project of Yale University and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The report has made four major recommendations in this connection:

1. Policymakers should collaborate closely with technical researchers to investigate, prevent, and mitigate potential malicious uses of AI.

2. Researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence should take the dual-use nature of their work seriously, allowing misuse-related considerations to influence research priorities and norms, and proactively reaching out to relevant actors when harmful applications are foreseeable.

3. Best practices should be identified in research areas with more mature methods for addressing dual-use concerns, such as computer security, and imported where applicable to the case of AI.

4. Actively seek to expand the range of stakeholders and domain experts involved in discussions of these challenges.

AI aims at systematic automation of a varied range of tasks. Playing games, guiding vehicles, and classifying images are some of the typical tasks involved in these technologies. At large, the scale of tasks that AI is capable of transforming, is broad.

Let us look into 5 important reasons that stress AI could transform and eventually will take over the world:

1. Image Recognition

In a graphical trend shown in the report, the margin for human error against human performance in detecting synthetic images fell down astronomically over a few decades. Over the past five years, the performance of the best AI systems has improved from correctly categorizing around 70% of images to near perfect categorization (98%), better than the human benchmark of 95% accuracy.

2. Assassinations Will Be Easier to Carry Out and Conceal The Culprit

AI increases anonymity and psychological distance. Many tasks involve communicating with other people, observing or being observed by them, making decisions that respond to their behavior, or being physically present with them.

3. Impersonating Voices To Become Simpler

Most people are not capable of mimicking others’ voices. However, there has been significant progress in developing speech synthesis systems that learn to imitate others’ voices. This technology is already being commercialized. Phone calls can be easily misinterpreted using this technology, giving way to a lot of misconduct.

4. AI Could Pave Way For Attacks On Democracy

Similar to Russia’s Influence on Our 2016 Election, AI-enabled analysis of social networks are leveraged to identify key influencers, who can then be approached with offers or targeted with disinformation.

5. Attacks on AI Itself Will Become More Prevalent

There is every chance that attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities of AI systems are to become more typical. This prediction follows directly from the unresolved vulnerabilities of AI systems and the likelihood that AI systems will become increasingly pervasive.