The Real AI Threat?

Thu Dec 10 14:43:49 UTC 2020

adamv0025 at netconsultings.com wrote:
> > Put them together, and the nightmare scenario is:
> > - machine learning algorithm detects need for more resources
> All good so far
> > - machine learning algorithm makes use of vulnerability analysis library 
> > to find other systems with resources to spare, and starts attaching
> > those resources
>
> Right so a company would built, trained and fine-tuned an AI, or would 
> have bought such a product and implemented it as part of its NMS/DDoS 
> mitigation suite, to do the above?
>
> What is the probability of anyone thinking that to be a good idea?
>
> To me that does sound like an AI based virus rather than a tool one 
> would want to develop or buy from a third party and then integrate 
> into the day to day operations.
>
> You can’t take for instance alpha-0 or GPT-3 and make it do the above. 
> You’d have to train it to do so over millions of examples and trials.
>
> Oh and also these won’t “wake up” one day and “think” to themselves oh 
> I’m fed up with Atari games I’m going to learn myself some chess and 
> then do some reading on wiki about the chess rules.
>

Jeez... some guys seem to take a joke literally - while ignoring a real 
and present danger - which was the point.

Meanwhile, yes, I think that a poorly ENGINEERED DDoS mitigation suite 
might well have failure modes that just keep eating up resources until 
systems start crashing all over the place.  Heck, spinning off processes 
until all available resources have been exhausted has been a failure 
mode of systems for years.  Automated resource discovery + automated 
resource allocation = recipe for disaster.  (No need for AIs eating the 
world.)

Miles

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

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