Malevolent AI: Fact or Fiction? Far Away or Soon to Come?

                

                As of right now, it seems that most of our class discussions about A.I. have been geared towards looking at A.I. in a positive frame. We can regularly see A.I. misbehaving in a multitude of sci-fi movies such as The Terminator series, The Matrix trilogy, and even "Avengers: Age of Ultron", whose antagonist robot is pictured above. Since these movies are disappointingly unrealistic by today's standards (unless we are currently living in the matrix, and you are all robots...), it's hard to relate much of what we see. So this made me wonder, what would a so-called malevolent A.I. look/act like?

                When looking for answers to this question, I stumbled across an article titled “AI gone wrong: Cybersecurity director warns of 'malevolent AI'.” In this article, author Hope Reese interviews the director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, Roman Yampolskiy, in order to discuss the possible dangers of creating A.I. devices. This article is a great read about what ‘malevolent A.I.’ is and how it seemingly isn’t so farfetched anymore.

                After reading through this article I was impressed in two separate capacities. First, how far along in A.I. we have come. Think about it, nearly every bit of electronic device made anymore has a touch of A.I. in it whether it is primitive or complex in use and design. Secondly, I noticed how easy it would be for a malevolent device to take over many other devices and use them for itself. In a different article on Scientific American, the writer talks more deeply about how A.I. is created and how he believes we are too far out to have A.I. be a threat as some mainstream scientists are concerned. However I disagree with his views. We have already seen how hackers are able to dig through coding and find ways into other devices and take control of them. I believe it would be possible to program bots to do this on their own as well. The point here being that although we may not have yet made an A.I. system that has all the attributes of something that could be malevolent, we are near making all of the individual aspects. It will only take one programmer compiling all of these into one device, similar to the ‘super computer’ in the movie ‘Eagle Eye.’ This article further goes along with my views as well. My question is which will happen first: Humans creating malevolent A.I. intentionally or unintentionally? We have all the pieces, but who will be the first person to begin putting these together?