How Artificial Intelligence Is Being Weaponized

What happens when AI becomes like a 1984 dictator?

I cover AI and future trends for a living. One overreaching theme I’ve noticed is how AI is being
used not to augment people, but to weaponize their data against them. This is going to be a long
read, and it's because I feel a bit passionate about this topic.

The debate over free-speech this week related to the Hong Kong protests signals no trade war
resolution will take place since a cold tech war also is about information wars and basic freedom of
speech.

As companies with billion-dollar market caps like Microsoft, Apple and Google cave into
creating censorship products, we all lose and begin to enter a potential data-based Neo-
Fascism era of control and surveillance.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, this is LinkedIn, so let's talk about AI adoption more broadly.

Businesses across almost every industry deploy artificial intelligence to make jobs simpler for staff
and tasks easier for consumers. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s also a dark side to this
tech.

Indeed unbridled adoption of AI won’t just result in job losses, but data purgatory, and an internet
that could begin to feel more like slavery, than education and freedom. It’s 2019, not 1984, but it
might as well be.

AI is the “New God of Capitalism”

The surveillance state, increasing, is all I ever think about when I think of AI. I don’t have a
Ph.D in sociology but at this point, so much is being left unsaid and unregulated.

Google is becoming like China and the world is changing, and it’s not all for the better. Facebook is
a tyranny and data points on our children will be oppressive. They will be ranked by AI and won’t
be treated as people in the 2030s and 2040s. We won’t just be watched by robots, CCTV cameras in
nearly all major global cities and an AI power that might as well be the new God of capitalism.

What we will witness in the future will make Facebook’s privacy invasions and third party data
violations and political hacking look pretty soft.

Artificial Intelligence will become a tool for classifying and ranking people and what begins in the
2020s won’t end well for humanity. It’s not just the social credit architecture of China, it’s how AI
isn’t being regulated with any forethought to how humans be will be treated in the future.

Facial recognition laws will become obsolete, regulatory bodies will fail and AI will outpace itself.

Our grandchildren won’t wake up one morning and say “the internet is not a free place”. Indeed
they never gave that Tik Tok app permission to take their data. There’s no global body to actually
give guidelines on what AI should be and should be used for.
In the 7th mass extinction, if climate change doesn’t get us first, it might actually be the descendent
of the AI we are creating today. AI could be the ultimate exploit of how humans weaponize data
against each other.

Between 2018 and 2019, organizations that have deployed artificial intelligence (AI) grew from 4%
to 14%, according to Gartner’s 2019 CIO Agenda survey. This means AI adoption is still in its
infancy but in the 2020s things will ramp up, and so will the abuses of the weaponization of AI.

Here I’m not just talking about cybersecurity vulnerabilities that will “work themselves out”. I’m
talking about how billionaires, authoritarian states, tech executives and even capitalism itself
incentivize using AI for profit but also against human good.

The weaponization of AI is sort of inevitable, like the misuse of

any early technology, the dangers are immense.
What if you suddenly invented something that could do everything? Would it also be used for evil?
Something that could recommend content, power chatbots, trade stocks better, detect medical
conditions better than doctors, and even drive cars in a safer way than humans? That’s AI.

Welcome to the future, dear global citizens and netizens.

Speed recognition by 2022 reaches a mass of mainstream adoption. By then surveillance

architectures in smart cities will be starting to realize that to keep up with China, we’ll have to copy
elements of its social credit system. Ranking people isn’t a choice if you want to win the race to AI.
Tech companies and the U.S. military don’t want to fall behind.

Even the most obscure and supposedly pragmatic uses of AI will have their fair share of abuses. AI
will also make the wealthy richer. So what does Gartner think are the new uses of AI?

In a nutshell, these 8 AI-powered spokes below.

1. AI Cloud Services — AI cloud services are hosted services that allow

development teams to incorporate the advantages inherent in AI and
machine learning.
2. AutoML — Automated machine learning is the capability of automating
the process of building, deploying, and managing machine learning
models.
3. Augmented Intelligence — Augmented intelligence is a human-centered
partnership model of people and artificial intelligence working together to
enhance cognitive performance, including learning, decision making, and
new experiences.
4. Explainable AI — AI researchers define “explainable AI” as an
ensemble of methods that make black-box AI algorithms’ outputs
sufficiently understandable.
5. Edge AI — Edge AI refers to the use of AI techniques embedded in IoT
endpoints, gateways and edge devices, in applications ranging from
autonomous vehicles to streaming analytics.
 6. Reinforcement Learning — Reinforcement learning has the primary
potential for gaming and automation industries and has the potential to
lead to significant breakthroughs in robotics, vehicle routing, logistics and
other industrial control scenarios.
7. Quantum Computing — Quantum computing has the potential to make
significant contributions to the areas of systems optimization, machine
learning, cryptography, drug discovery and organic chemistry. Although
outside the planning horizon of most enterprises, quantum computing
could have strategic impacts in key businesses or operations.
8. AI Marketplaces — Gartner defines an AI Marketplace as an easily
accessible place supported by a technical infrastructure that facilitates the
publication, consumption and billing of reusable algorithms. Some
marketplaces are used within an organization to support the internal
sharing of prebuilt algorithms among data scientists.
Sounds pretty mundane, right?

AI in the 21st century catches up and overtakes the performance of people, but people don’t get any
smarter.

These are only a small handful of the most trendy business uses and exponential uses of artificial
intelligence, but what about the ones they don’t tell us about?

An era of biometric and genetic data means once AI gets entrenched in healthcare, finance and
education, there’s no turning back. China is already at that point. Things go a bit slower in the
United States, due to politics and people like Elizabeth Warren and those pesky socialist leaning
Millennials.

The term “artificial intelligence” is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic
human behavior. So what happens when AI gets so good at being itself it begins to make people
obsolete? What happens when this occurs in industry after industry like a tidal wave?

It’s not just the sense of being watched, it’s the sense of the inevitability of being overtaken.

At the moment, Western civilization hasn’t reached the point where AI-based systems are used en
masse to categorize us according to whether we’re likely to be “good” employees, “good”
customers, “good” dates and “good” citizens. But how long will that honestly take? 10 years? 15?
20? It’s only a matter of time. We already judge each other based on Tinder swipes and Instagram
accounts.

AI-powered systems are now being used to screen employees. China’s social credit experiment
can take away your privilege to travel. All of these reinforcements and punishments in a world
where AI is God — not as crazy as it once sounded.

AI, robotics and those “smart technologies” will create a society that will feel fundamentally less
human. Human-centric or empathetic AI won’t be able to catch up to the more carnal and obvious
misuses of AI, to obtain control and maintain power.
Google’s smart clothing will allow it to see what you do and where, and how you live. Got to give
DARPA some props sometimes.

Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, had earmarked disused land in Toronto, Canada for this
bold urban experiment, which it hoped would become a model for other cities around the world.
Sidewalk Labs had a far grander vision than the 12 acre (48,500 sq m) site it had talked about.
Toronto residents and onlookers are concerned that they are not getting transparency. You don’t
say!

While many reports tout the benefits of AI, there are many risks and unintended consequences,
including the likelihood of replacing millions of human workers and myriad unethical uses of the
technology.

People are starting to realize algorithms, mobile addiction and the future exponential tech littered
with AI might not actually be good for us. Google’s proximity to Huawei, China and DARPA is, of
course, a bit concerning.

But the lack of regulation in AI is, I think, the biggest concern for what an AI global net becomes.
National rivalries and global capitalism drive a fierce implementation of AI that could feel like
totalitarian fascist data slavery. I didn’t always believe this.

But as an amateur futurist, I’m starting to get worried.

People that work or used to work in Silicon Valley are starting to be concerned.

Onlookers of China’s surveillance net know what is coming.

Artificial intelligence is a super powerful tool and like any really powerful tool, it can be used to do
a lot of things — some of which are good and some of which can be problematic. Without a safety
net (real oversight) or ethical training wheels, AI will get dangerous in a hurry for groups of people
and for our descendants.

The FTC has failed to regulate BigTech and China is moving ahead too fast now.

Global capitalism has been corrupted by its greed for AI products that harvest data and are used
unethically.

When our biggest tech island states show a predisposition to abuse their power to dominate the
future, how can AI be people-centric or benign? The two realities are incompatible.

What happens in Huawei, Google, Amazon or Alibaba doesn’t stay just in the customer base of
those global titans. Their products will define a generation of how AI will be scaled globally.

China is using facial recognition to closely scrutinize its citizens who could be punished for certain
transgressions. So what will happen to our children one day?

Everything we ever do, say, share online, every digital transaction could be used to profile us. Our
genetic vulnerabilities mined, our talents mapped, our capabilities compared with others.

Society augmented with AI will be a vicious national competition of selection. It won’t just be a
wealth class definition, but how native we are to AI products, how “augmented” we are.
The world’s most advanced cities aren’t ready for the disruptions of artificial intelligence. If
companies, countries and governments are failing in AI regulation, so will cities.

The automation wave without the weaponization of AI would be nasty enough alone. The U.S. will
be required to retool at least 11.5 million people in America with the skills needed to survive in the
workforce. Millions of workers in Brazil, Japan and Germany will need assistance with the changes
wrought by AI, robotics and related technology.

Computers, intelligent machines and robots seem like the workforce of the future, while data and
algorithms herd the unemployable peasants. That’s us, by the way. Don’t believe me, write your
2050 self a note.

AI is coming for you, your data, to augment you and also to classify you in ways you cannot yet
even imagine.