WWIII will be the first AI war and it will be fought in cyberspace
AI is taking the world by storm and I want to share some wild speculations about what the future will bring.
As AI capabilities are getting better exponentially every week I try to imagine where this is leading us. With current trend it is not too wild to predict that the following will happen pretty soon:
- AI will have ability to perform any mental task with superhuman intelligence.
- No area of mental activity will be saved. AI will be able to create any digital program, image, video when given simple instructions.
Let’s assume that it is true. What will be the first task that rogue governments will give such superhuman AI? Of course the instruction will be to ‘hack’ another country, gather intelligence and data. Very soon we will start seeing AI bots trying to penetrate defences of other countries. These bots will quickly find insecurities in the network protocols, create backdoors and viruses. How such a threat can be stopped? No human will be smarter than AI at this point, so countering will happen by running other AI agents as defenders of networks. This will trigger the AI war. The losing parties of this war will decide to physically separate from global internet and create their own, internal networks. Such AI war will lead to collapse of internet as a global communications system. Probably some satellites will also go down in the process.
After the collapse of the global internet measures will have to be taken in order to prevent individuals from giving AI commands to hack the separated networks for their own benefits. This will trigger a complete reorganisation of computing power access. Having access to enough computing power that can run powerful AIs will have to be kept under check the same way that gun laws are implemented. That means there will need to be laws that limit individual access to computing power. Anything that you will do with computing power that is available to you will have to be audited and tracked. Kids will have access to simple general computing, adults to more resource, but the most powerful AI models will be only availble for researchers, military and government. This will be the end of the ‘wild west’ of computing and we will be entering an age of rationed computing power. It will be the age of gatekeepers.
During this time the AI will become heavily regulated it will be a crime to use AI that is above your computing quota. Each computing resource will be bound to your ID and you will have to be responsible for the use of the resource.
When can this AI war start happening? With the current pace of technology I would not be too surprised if it begins this or next year.
