Good News: A.I. Is Getting Cheaper. That’s Also Bad News.<br />“But what is harder to anticipate — and wrap our heads around — is all the less tangible ways that A. I.<br />is being integrated into our lives.”<br />The rapid evolution of A. I.<br />is creating new security holes.<br />On Tuesday, a group of artificial intelligence researchers and policymakers from prominent labs and think tanks in both the United States and Britain released a report<br />that described how rapidly evolving and increasingly affordable A. I.<br />technologies could be used for malicious purposes.<br />But there may be bigger concerns in less obvious places, said Paul Scharre, another author of the report, who had helped set policy involving autonomous systems<br />and emerging weapons technologies at the Defense Department and is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.<br />Researchers are also developing A. I.<br />systems that can find and exploit security holes in all sorts of other systems, Mr. Scharre said.<br />But at times, new A. I.<br />systems also exhibit strange and unexpected behavior because the way they learn from large amounts of data is not entirely understood.<br />In time, putting these pieces together — researchers call them dual-use technologies — will become increasingly easy and inexpensive.
