TrustNoRobot

Category: Existential Risk

  • Imagine All The (DeepFake) People

    Imagine the year is 1989, and I put in front of you a computer with a mouse, keyboard, and wired connection to, if not the Internet, CompuServe or one of the other graphical interfaces to remote machines and information.

    Now, if I asked you to project forward twenty years, could you have imagined all that boiled down and expanded 100x in your pocket, connected wirelessly to billions of remote services? Some people have that kind of imagination for sure, but most people would have struggled to see how it would be possible. Or necessary.

    Now I ask you to consider these technologies:

    1) Realtime face mapping to simulate another person, as seen here.

    2) Realtime voice cloning that matches your own voice, as seen on sites like lyrebird.ai.

    3) Enough processing power to enable real-time near-perfect simulation of a human being.

    All three of these things exist today, and we are already seeing the emergence of DeepFakes as a service with sites like deepfakesweb.com. Sure, it’s not anywhere near passable as a human yet, but neither was your Apple IIe as a mobile device.

    And here is the kicker: it’s not going to take 20 years. It’s going to happen over the next two years. By 2021 you will not be able to trust the authenticity of any given talking head video unless it’s certified in some way.

    We don’t need new laws to protect us from this forced-Turing test, existing fraud and copyright laws should suffice. We need new technology. And not tech to identify a fake once it’s out in the world, already damaging our identities, but rather tech to certify the authenticity of a video from its inception.

    Digital watermarking will be an important component of this new technology, but that’s like saying RAM is an important component of your mobile device. We will need to authenticate our devices and use Distributed Human Identity Tests to validate ourselves.

    More about some research on AI-based digital watermarking research:

    It replaces the typical photo development pipeline with a neural network—one form of AI—that introduces carefully crafted artifacts directly into the image at the moment of image acquisition. These artifacts, akin to “digital watermarks,” are extremely sensitive to manipulation.

    In tests, the prototype imaging pipeline increased the chances of detecting manipulation of images and video from approximately 45 percent to over 90 percent without sacrificing image quality.

    It’s a start, but will need to be created into consumer tech rapidly to afford us any protection from the chaos that is about to occur.

    DeepFakes are going to be a lethal new weapon dropped into the ongoing ideological, class, and epistemological battles being waged in our society. The level of disruption they will cause is hard to imagine, but start by thinking about a perfect video of you saying the opposite of your current political beliefs posted on social networks.

    Identifying bots is almost impossible now. When they begin to hijack real identities, or fabricate them whole cloth, the game is over for a trusting society.

    Astounding Science Fiction Oct 1953 cover art

  • Language Flails, Truth Fails

    Technology creates inequality.

    Technology removes inequality.

    Both of these statements are, practically speaking, true. The first is really hard to argue against. Even a simple pencil gives one human more power than another. Not to mention what the internet, cars, AI, etc. can provide.

    But… technology that is accessible to all levels the playing field. For just one example, I can think of the software engineers I have worked with from around the world who came from poverty but who knew how to hussle and learn, had access to a computer, and once they had their CS degree (and not even that sometimes) they were off to the races. These are people who grew up in section-8 housing, but programming let them find a way into another social class. I have known a dozen of them, and they are often outstanding engineers.

    So maybe if two things that are counterposed can be true, the difficulty lies in the assumption that logic, following the rules of language, is flawed. Or that it is useful to make categorical statements using language.

    And here is the thing about language that most philosophical and political debate misses: it doesn’t point at a single truth. Syllogisms are pure intellectual garbage. The truth of our messy world just cannot be modelled accurately with words, or even simple ideas like equality. Certainly not with dictates from the Bronze Age.

    So, how do we move forward as a species, with so much hinging on the bad tech of language?

    One way I would not recommend is what the phenomenologists tried to do: try to make the observation of reality and consciousness into something objective outside language. They failed. We can’t do that, at least not do it and then talk about it. It’s like a weaving a basket out of water. And even if you get to some simple truths that way, the complicated moral ones will elude you.

    No, we do not need a new language of truth. We need a new experience of truth, a new understanding. A new way to access, store, and query our thoughts.

    Or, do we just let go of truth completely and wing it?

    That unfortunately seems to be the way the world is turning, at least in the political and social spheres. But as the truth recedes new generations are swinging back hard to searching for simple answers, and along the way a whole lot of people will get things wrong about human induced climate change, and a lot of unvaccinated kids will be dead.

    Science needs to step up its game and stop worrying about collecting and assessing people’s opinions, and start worrying about changing opinions. With the future of the species on the line, giving voice to climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers is akin to forming a fiddling committee while Rome incinerates.

    The truth isn’t what language or any abstract symbol system tells us. It’s what we are willing to fight and argue for.

  • The Greatest Flag in the Universe

    A break from AI and ethics for a quick haiku for my favorite flag.

    The Triumph of man,

    The Laurel wreath, wraped around

    A Gear; claiming Space

    The Laurel wreath is a symbol of triumph. On the white field it proclaims boldly the victory of humanity. But what is this victory?

    Look closer. The Gear, the symbol of technology and industry, envelops space and stars and planets. The totality of the universe.

    There is only one flag that claims boldly, humans can use technology to contain the Universe.

    That is the flag of the United Federation of Planets.

    And you don’t even need to be a Trekkie to fly it. Well, you don’t need to watch Deep Space 9, anyhow.

    The thing I like most about this flag is how absurd it is. If you know how I feel about space, you’ll understand. Surrounding space with tech is the greatest hubris there is. Space is going to kill us all, and its vastness and danger should be the one thing that binds us together as a species.

    By the way, did you know that studies have shown when Astronauts from all cultures visit space, it changes their value systems? Makes them more accepting and inclusive?

    After returning, the astronauts showed increased concern with Universalism, Spirituality, and Power (social recognition), a broadened set of references to values oriented toward the collective good.

    Huh.

    The United Federation of Planets Flag also clearly expresses how I feel about current terrestrial politics. I would rather fly the flag of a fictional future government from an overacted television mythology than the flag of any current national affiliation, on most days anyhow.

    But I do love the stars and stripes on the holidays and lazy summer days, and while I think it is ridiculous to take pride in the location on the planet you were accidentally born, there are worse things than being an American. And the US flag does honor those who have given everything for our freedom of thought and speech. Say what you will about Americans, but we are loud as hell and not going to change anytime soon. I sort of like that.

    And considering the amount of taxes I pay to New York State, the NY State flag is another one I have earned the right to fly:

    Plus, it says Excelsior, which means roughly “ever upward”. It’s the Stan Lee flag! And also a Star Trek ship name. How great is that!?

    But seriously, I’m not a real Trekkie. No cosplay, I promise.

  • Stopping the Enders by Solving Disease

    What if we are not doomed?

    So, I recommend listening to After On, a really amazing podcast that covers some of the topics most relevant to our species, and this blog lingers on: AI, ethics, technology and change. The most recent podcast was an interview with Naval Ravikant, and it’s a great exploration of existential risk that will hopefully instill listeners with a sense of the challenges facing our species.

    Episode 44: Naval Ravikant | End Games (part one) | Click to Listen

    Episode 45: Naval Ravikant | End Games (part two) | Click to Listen

    And in it, they both agree that we are pretty much doomed.

    The reason is: we have Enders. Enders are members of our species who are suicidal and homicidal and who, if given a button to push that would end all human life, would push that button. Without hesitation.

    This problem isn’t just solved by limiting access to machine guns. This threat makes school shootings appear quaint. Because synthetic biology is going to let people craft diseases that can wipe out, well, everyone. CRISPR editing techniques will make it possible for an undergraduate level human to craft death for the species in a bottle.

    Except, what if…we evolved.

    What if this threat, from the unseen world of microbiology, is what propelled us to take disease seriously. What if we had a Manhattan Project approach to artificially augment our immune systems to protect us from anything. And then used synthetic biology gene editing to ensure this approach became part of the DNA of our entire species.

    Big thought, especially since we barely understand our immune system now. But if I told you that an asteroid was heading to wipe out the planet in five years, I am pretty sure we would get pretty good at launching rockets pretty fast.

    The asteroid is on its way, but it is too small to see and comes with a cough. Then people just start dropping dead. No zombies, no dramatic music, no planes into buildings, just dead people and complete social breakdown.

    We are an amazing species and I refuse to give up because of some broken Enders. There are only two paths to avoid catastrophic action from a biological pathogen. Either we identify and stop all the Enders from obtaining the necessary technology and know-how, which seems unlikely since even intelligent and stable people can become suicidal, or we cure disease for all time.

    At a certain point our species needed to travel across the sea, so we built boats. Now we need to extend our immune systems to become vessels to help us navigate these dangerous waters. Machine learning and synthetic biology can protect us, just as it can kill us.

    What will not protect us is more fear. We are filled with fear and dread, at least you will be after listening to that podcast and considering the reality of our situation. We need a serious multinational approach toward building real defenses against the horror to come.

    Maybe someday we will be able to detect Enders using AI. But when all it takes is one miss to result in apocalypse, we can’t risk a misidentification. But if nothing could make us sick, we not only have mitigated the risk, we have made the world a better place.

    Image from Vox article on CRISPR