Comment by bigbadfeline | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigbadfeline | Hacker News Reader

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> Attack is often far easier than defense

Outdated views. In this case the attack is much harder, because the offender has to:

1. Develop offensive AI capabilities in secret.

2. Procure hazardous materials (nuclear, biological, etc) illegally and in secret

3. Find funds for CPU. GPU, energy, etc for a rather large and hard to hide undertaking.

4. Deal with a whole lot of other players, both government and private, who are armed with AI and have a keen interest in anything looking out of normal or secret.

5. Lastly, the offender will have to overcome the AI-assisted defenses against his actions - you think defense is harder but you fail to notice that the resources used for defense dwarf those available to offenders.

With that said, some very large private makers of closed AI will still be capable of developing doom capabilities, this can be fixed by mandating open source AI and better antitrust regulations.

A few governments will be capable of developing highly destructive weapons too - as they're now, and have been for quite some time. This problem is independent of AI and requires smart policies like improving international relations, better treaties concerning WMDs, etc.

> 1. Develop offensive AI capabilities in secret.

No, the capabilities can be and are developed without any secrecy. Necessary is only that the models don't refuse at least some unethical requests. Since alignment is hard, this will likely continue to be the default outcome.

> 2. Procure hazardous materials (nuclear, biological, etc) illegally and in secret

That may be hard in some countries with tight and effective regulations. But at least for biological weapons, it will be fairly doable for relatively small actors to circumvent these regulations.

For nuclear weapons, which require larger machinery and infrastructure, foreign state actors can also do things completely legally in their home country.

Things being illegal in country A doesn't help against country B doing things with AIs that were previously outside the bounds of their capability. So far WMD research was heavily limited by technical expertise, not just materials. AI changes that.

> 3. Find funds for CPU. GPU, energy, etc for a rather large and hard to hide undertaking

Renting some cloud-based AI tokens without guardrails, or even letting a few abliterated models run locally, to carry out the necessary research, is not a big undertaking. AI inference is very cheap compared to most other things.

> 4. Deal with a whole lot of other players, both government and private, who are armed with AI and have a keen interest in anything looking out of normal or secret

So far this has not succeeded in preventing various attacks by state and non-state actors, like the Binance hack or the supermarket supply chain attacks in Europe. I don't see how future AI would dramatically increase international surveillance to stop future malicious actors.

And all this doesn't even get into a highly capable misaligned AI model escaping human control altogether.

> So far this has not succeeded in preventing various attacks by state and non-state actors, like the Binance hack or the supermarket supply chain attacks in Europe.

I'm not talking about hacking, it's not an existential threat, it's a consequence of sloppy software and business practices, hacking attack actually help by forcing better software and bankrupting the incompetent businesses - there are currently too many of them due to political reasons, if we're lucky we'll see political improvements as well.

> like the Binance hack

Binance and crypto in general is a larger threat than the sum of all AI, it's legalized corruption, the question is why we are worried about AI but not about crypto.

Your other points refer mostly to state actors but as I said before, those risks are independent of AI and they have existed long before models were a thing. I suspect you, as many others, lacked information about the WMD situation in the world and became aware of it only in the context of AI, but if you remove AI you'll see that very little changes.

About biological weapons in particular, they're easy, they already exist and have been studied for years, AI can contribute very little to the downside here but it can help us tremendously with detecting and protecting from them.

The real problem with bioweapons is sloppy regulations and totally dysfunctional international treaties. The problem isn't AI, it's the lack of rational policies, I wish politicians were as serious about WMD risks as you are about AI, but that's not the case today. AI fearmongering is just a political tool used for the benefit of certain special interests.

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