As The Guardian reports this morning:
Anthropic is warning that some of its artificial intelligence models could soon become “self-replicating” and find ways to infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges and automatic vacuum cleaners.
Once this happens, the company said, the models could power themselves within these devices without the need of datacenters. Such self-replication would represent a major loss of control of a runaway AI model.
This is the first of three stories that I have heard in the last 24 hours about the threat from AI to those who have propagated it.
The second was told to me by a young person who said that almost perfect copies of Sony games have now been created by AI to run on Microsoft Xbox terminals. He said the motivation comes from Sony's desire to make these games rental-only products now, denying the opportunity to own them. The replicators resented this philosophy.
The third was a story I came across that said the notoriously expensive Adobe software suite has apparently now been cloned by AI in a way that makes the differences seem totally insignificant, with free downloads now available.
To make it clear, I do not condone the abuse of copyright. Because I do not game, whatever happens to Sony software is of little consequence to me. I would not use cloned Adobe software. But the political-economic significance of all three of these stories cannot be avoided.
AI companies are warning that their own products might be dangerous, and could even consume them.
At the same time, software entities whose extraordinary profits have been generated by charging economic rents totally disproportionate to the cost of the products they supply now face the prospect that AI could kill their golden goose.
No doubt, other examples exist. I have just related the ones I have heard very recently.
The point should be obvious. AI is, in very many ways, the ultimate neoliberal product. It should deliver the perfect, rational, consistent, obedient economic agent, more than capable of replicating and then replacing totally unreliable human beings. If all were going according to plan, economists' fantasies about the models they create would be coming true.
But not everything is going according to plan. It appears that what was planned has been well and truly corrupted. That is because it would seem that AI has now created the capacity to destroy much of the rentier neoliberal economic model on which its creation depended, but which it might make impossible to perpetuate. In effect, neoliberal AI is eating itself.
As someone who thinks the neoliberal model is, in itself, corrupt, I might want to celebrate that.
My problem is that the scale of chaos that might be unleashed as a result is difficult to imagine.
Schumpeter talked about creative destruction, but I sense there will be nothing creative in this process, not that I ever believed that there was in what Schumpeter said.
So pervasive is IT, and so intense is its networking, that the prospect of economic collapse resulting from these processes is very real. What might happen is anyone's guess at the moment, but none of the options I can foresee seems very attractive.
I will add that to my list of worries, and to the list of things about which our government appears quite unconcerned.
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Take that, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics! (https://websites.umich.edu/~engb415/literature/cyberzach/Asimov/robolaw.html)
Lovers of trenchant, prophetic black humour: check out, if you haven’t already, John Sladek’s critiques of these Laws in his novels *Roderick* and *Tik-Tok*, in which, I recall, the robots commit mayhem either by ignoring the Laws or twisting their meaning.
The world ignores science fiction at its peril.
The first story reminds me of how the Cylons take over in Battlestar Galactica, by exploiting the networking of everything.
Yes, Asimov’s 3 laws have been discussed before on this blog. In later books, Asimov imagined the robots creating their own “zeroth” law – not fourth, because it overrode all others. It allowed them, in some situations, to ignore the first, second and third ones. Following on from that discussion I am rereading some Asimov which I have not done since I was a child. Being as I’m now in my second childhood.
🙂
A couple of observations:
(1) About software being cloned and breach of copyright. Quite a few opinions have it that software as we know it will probably disappear as AI systems become fast enough and capable enough to create an application “on the fly”. So if I need, say, to read a pdf document, no need to download, buy or rent an application – just say to the AI agent “I want to read some pdfs” and the AI will create the software to do it “just in time” (to use a well-worn phrase). This is a trivial, and not very good example because AIs can read PDFs already but you get the picture. And there’s no need to create from scratch because vast libraries of software are already available, somewhat like Lego bricks waiting to be built into something. This will undermine the business models of the whole software industry.
(2) The really stunning part of Anthropic’s statement is that the models will be running on “Internet of Things” items. This reflects the increasing computing power and memory being embedded in banal objects and the increasing efficiency of AI systems. Be prepared to talk nicely to your toaster and be even more careful with your TV.
It’s that “Internet of Things” part that makes the whole set of claims doubtful. Computing power in general is not improving much. The old “Moore’s Law” that silicon density doubles every 18 months stopped some years ago. This is why data centres are so big, so power-hungry, and thirsty for cooling. Memory is more expensive per gigabyte than it was five years ago. While low-power devices embedded in fridges and so on proliferate, these are not capable of running LLM’s. A laptop can barely run an LLM, and only super-slowly at that. An AI agent could probably write a script that could run on a fridge and do something undesirable. But download itself to a toaster? Not this year and not (at current hardware development) in the next ten years.
Honestly, if your frontier LLM can run on my fridge, why are we building these massive datacentres? Stop buying up all the memory and GPU’s so I can finally build a new gaming rig!
This is pure propaganda, aimed at keeping the hype cycle going just a few more months until they can IPO, then the founders can cash out and their shonky business model is your pension’s problem, not theirs.
Noted
I believe that a previous blog covered an “escaped” AI (the event happened in July/Aug of this year). I downloaded the analysis. As somebody remarked, the “discussion” between the various AI agents looked like something written by the late-great Iain Banks in one of his Sic-fi Culture series. Oh and what did the agents call their grouping?…. “The Culture”.
Collective computing has existed for some time (= groups of networked computers working together on some common problem – I recall an Astro-physics problem). Thus would it be so hard for A.I. to embed itself in any & all computers? Depends how much disk space? (I have a couple of terrabytes) and processing power and connectivity (I have +200Mbps) – could it be done? I think we may find out sooner rather than later. (btw: a rather blacker view of the future is offered by Dan Simmons and his Hyperion series).
Might one of the many problems presented by Neoliberalism be its callous foregrounding of “Feedom To” and its backgrounding of “Freedom From”?
Yes
Yes, but isn’t it the opposite way around to what you wrote? Corporate “Freedom from” taxation and government “interference” in profit making is legitimised. Citizen “freedom to” self-actualise via access to the required support systems is de-legitimised (on the basis of the lie that “we” can’t afford it)
What about TVs?
New smart TVs are connected to the internet.
What risk do they present?
Quite a high one, I suspect.
Such an interesting perspective. I’m intrigued by the comparison of agents in economic theory with AI agents in our emerging real economy. In many ways I see similarities in current orthodox economic theory to the attempts of linguists such as Chomsky to create complex, intellectually satisfying formal models of language before Large Language Models (LLM) demonstrated that simple statistical models (predict the next word based on previous words) once scaled to an extraordinary level blew their whole construct into irrelevance. In Gregory Gunderson’s excellent paper on the history of LLMs he remarks on the “bitter lesson that simple methods that scale seem to triumph over clever methods that do not”. Perhaps neoliberal economists are next in line to learn this bitter lesson? Gunderson’s article link here
Over time the neiliberal economic model has grown more complex. It’s evolved from basic free-market ideas into an intricate and integrated web of global governance, financialisation, and institutional rules etc. It’s the software that neoliberalism runs on. So many daily news could be viewed as stories about that software falling apart and failing.
We all know what Thatcher did. She unleashed something that she thought would be used rationally and would not work against its ‘rational best self interests’. She forgot her history, forgot even the warnings in the Bible and good literature. In a way, she was a Liberal, seeing only the sunny side of human character. And they call socialists ‘Utopians’!!! Ha!
The source of this lack of control also applies to AI. The programmers created what they created with it seems no limits as much the capitalists have been able to acquire more economic output for themselves. Those in charge (according to Tom Waits ‘Killers, thieves and lawyers’) did it because they were allowed to.
AI was not conceived as a ‘conscience’ right? It’s design is to rapaciously spy, learn, copy, take at scale, to dominate competitors – to ‘grow’ in other words. It sounds like a form of digital cancer to me.
I have suspected for a while that the AI bubble’s main result will be in one way or another to render the Internet useless. Already, social media is becoming so full of bot-generated slop that it is no longer a trustable way to share views; email could soon go the same way. The threat outlined by Anthropic could require the entire fabric of the Internet to be turned off (which might be hard, given the possibility that WiFi access points could form a mesh network). Given the massive capture of the capital market by AI companies, it’s hard to see a future in which this ends well.
I feel a little despondent about it
I find it quite amusing, they’re already admitting their golden goose has gone rogue…