Artificial Intelligence Will Destroy Humanity In Future

Will artificial intelligence help humanity or harm it? To answer this question, we must first understand what Artificial intelligence is. Artificial intelligence or machine learning, is intelligence shown by machines, compared to the natural intelligence exhibited by humans, or in other words human-like intelligence displayed by a machine. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a big controversial topic among scientist over the past few years. Some famous experts such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates believe that AI will harm humanity. Artificial Intelligence will harm humanity currently and also in the future because AI will threaten and harm physical security, digital security, and political security.

Physical security is measures taken to avoid a physical action or event that could cause harm to personnel or property (such as theft, terrorism, or vandalism). One of the biggest threats to physical security that AI posses is terrorism. One way terrorist could use AI for malicious intent would be to reverse engineer retail AI systems. This includes using drones or any autonomous device to deliver explosives and cause crashes. With the use of AI, the scale of terrorism attacks will be increased. Individual or small groups capabilities to do greater damage will be increased. Higher levels of autonomy enable a greater amount of damage to be done by a single person, making possible very large-scale attacks using robots and allows smaller groups of people to conduct such attacks. The software components needed to carry out such attacks are becoming increasingly available. For example, open source face detection algorithms, navigation and planning algorithms, and multi-agent swarming frameworks that could be used for malicious means can easily be bought or developed with a skilled expert (Brundage 2018). AI also brings the possibility of swarming attacks. A swarming attack is a shared network of autonomous robotic systems, coordinating at super speed, provide pervasive surveillance to monitor large areas and execute quick, coordinated attacks. “Fully autonomous GPS-programmable drones can be purchased online today for only a few hundred dollars. Large numbers of them could be used to create an autonomous swarm carrying explosives or even crude chemical or biological agents” (Scharre 2015). Not only is the software needed for the swarm drones but the hardware is also readily available and relatively cheap. AI is not only a threat to physical security, it is also a threat to digital security.

Digital security is the protection of one’s identity, assets, and technology from intrusion by an outside source. Artificial intelligences biggest threat to humanity is the breach on digital security. One way AI could exploit humans would be automation of social engineering attacks (social engineering refers to psychological manipulation of people into giving confidential information). As AI develop further, chatbots will have the ability to elicit human trust by engaging people in realistic conversation and perhaps visually disguise as another person in a video chat……

Automation of code vulnerability and creation of code to exploit the vulnerability is a threat that AI could develop in the future. Code vulnerability is a defect in the code used to exploit the code itself. Anderson et al. created a machine learning system that can automatically generate command and control domains that are indistinguishable from legitimate domains by human and machine viewers. These domains are used by malware to “call home” and allow malicious actors to communicate with the host machines (2016). The AI system Anderson et al. created is effective at both code vulnerability and creation of code to allow malware to effectively infiltrate into a host machine. While the AI system was effective at allowing the malware to breach the host machine it is not able to hack into the host machine itself. Currently, artificial intelligence is not used for hacking but with the improvement of AI, autonomous software could exploit vulnerabilities in systems much better than what has previously been shown in history and, eventually surpass humans with their capabilities. A recent survey of attendees at the Black Hat conference found 62% of respondents believing AI will be used for attacks within the next 12 months (Cylance 2017). The cyber world includes a vast and convoluted world of cybercrime, which can involve a high degree of expertise and organization. Such groups use distributed-denial-of-service, malware, phishing, ransomware, and other forms of cyberoperation attacks, and quickly adopt emerging technologies. A denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which a host machine or network is unavailable due to a predator disrupting the service of the host connected to the internet. With the improvement of AI, autonomous software could be created to imitate human-like denial-of-service attacks…

Political security is simply defense against any kind of political oppression. AI is a big threat to political security because of its increasing capabilities to act human like in many situations. One way AI threatens political security is by creating fake news stories with realistic fabricated video and audio. The video would include fallacies and inflammatory comments about political officials that are false or misleading. Research conducted by Shao et al. , shows that articles published by seven fact checking organizations and 122 websites routinely published false or misleading news with the use of AI bots. The analysis focuses on mid-May 2016 to the end of March 2017. During the research period, 15,053 fact-checking articles and 389,569 unsubstantiated or false claims were collected (2017). Denial-of-information attacks are like Denial-of-service attacks on that they are both cyber-attacks, the only difference is that Denial-of-information attacks prevent host from finding correct information instead of preventing them from using a network or machine. AI’s denial-of-information attacks would be bot driven, large scale information generated attacks used to swamp political channels, making it difficult to find genuine information (Brundage 2018). Currently one of the biggest ways AI is being used to threaten political security is by the uses of bots. A bot, also known as web robot, is software application that carry out automated task on the internet. Mostly, bots preform simple and repetitive task. While not all bots are AI enhanced, the number of AI bots are increasing. Research was conducted to see if AI enhanced bots affected the 2016 election. Bots sent out a political message on twitter to see how many human users would retweet the bot. The result was a retweet network, where a connection represented a human retweeting a bot. Overall, this network consisted of 15,904 humans and 695 bots. The average number of times that a user retweeted a bot was 5 times. The average in-degree of bots in this network was 2, meaning that bots were retweeted by approximately 2 people on average. When examining only the bots who were retweeted by humans more than once, 122 bots were discovered. These bots were retweeted 63 times on average, with connections to 40 different humans on average. These results show that bots won a significant amount of attention and interaction from humans users (Woolley and Howard, 2017). The uses of AI with bots is still new technology, with the further development of AI systems the greater the impact AI will have on political security.

By many accounts, and proven research, artificial intelligence will harm humanity because it will threaten physical security, digital security, and political security. AI brings a big threat of physical security through terrorism by increasing the scale of terrorism and creating coordinated drone attacks. Autonomous AI software brings a threat to digital security using hacking, social engineering attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and exploiting code vulnerability. AI threatens political security by misleading people with false information with its human-like thinking. It is important to prepare for artificial intelligence now before it becomes a major problem in society because as the technology grows it will become a bigger part in every day life. Will artificial intelligence help humanity or harm it?