For you "Terminator" fans out there, you know what "Skynet" is.
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Elon Musk Says DARPA A.I. Hacking Challenge Will Lead to Skynet
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As
it stands today, of course, people perform this often thankless duty.
Expert hackers are adept at finding and fixing susceptibilities, but the
supply is short of the demand.
Elon Musk Says DARPA A.I. Hacking Challenge Will Lead to Skynet
Elon Musk Says DARPA A.I. Hacking Challenge Will Lead to Skynet
The
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is hosting a hacking
tournament that will conclude in August, in Las Vegas. Seven teams will
compete for $3.75 million in prize money, and the winner will receive $2
million of that. The goal of the tournament — the Cyber Grand Challenge — is to build Skynet. Or so Elon Musk thinks. On Thursday morning, he tweeted a not-so-veiled warning.
The actual goal is to build an automated artificial intelligence that is capable of detecting and resolving bugs in a computer security system. An unsupervised hacker extraordinaire that will detect system vulnerabilities and patch them itself. As it stands today, of course, people perform this often thankless duty. Expert hackers are adept at finding and fixing susceptibilities, but the supply is short of the demand. The process, DARPA writes, “can take over a year from first detection to the deployment of a solution, by which time critical systems may have already been breached.”
And, unfortunately, the demand for quick fixes to ever-present security issues will only continue to rise. Each year, more and more devices communicate information over the internet. DARPA is arguing that an automated A.I. system — the first such system in what would be “the first generation of machines that can discover, prove and fix software flaws in real-time, without any assistance” — would make our world far more secure.
Elon Musk might suggest otherwise.
His tweet may seem like it’s in jest, but then again Musk’s done stuff like sign this open letter warning about A.I. and call A.I. our “greatest existential threat.” And Skynet — from Terminator,
of course, and now a trope — is, by definition, an automated A.I. Once
we as a society unleash such a beast, these doomsayers say, there’ll be
no holding it back.
Musk probably knows that this DARPA challenge will not likely spawn Skynet, but it seems important to him that people consider the possibility of malevolent artificial intelligences.
The actual goal is to build an automated artificial intelligence that is capable of detecting and resolving bugs in a computer security system. An unsupervised hacker extraordinaire that will detect system vulnerabilities and patch them itself. As it stands today, of course, people perform this often thankless duty. Expert hackers are adept at finding and fixing susceptibilities, but the supply is short of the demand. The process, DARPA writes, “can take over a year from first detection to the deployment of a solution, by which time critical systems may have already been breached.”
And, unfortunately, the demand for quick fixes to ever-present security issues will only continue to rise. Each year, more and more devices communicate information over the internet. DARPA is arguing that an automated A.I. system — the first such system in what would be “the first generation of machines that can discover, prove and fix software flaws in real-time, without any assistance” — would make our world far more secure.
Elon Musk might suggest otherwise.
Musk probably knows that this DARPA challenge will not likely spawn Skynet, but it seems important to him that people consider the possibility of malevolent artificial intelligences.
Photos via Flickr / Dick Thomas Johnson
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