Will we be vulnerable to AI-crime in 2050?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and humans will coexist on planet earth in the next three decades, peacefully. ?The neo-normal of 2050 will be vastly different from what we experience today. Workdays will of course look quite different, travel to and from workplace to home will be different, our homes will see a 360o shift in the way we are organized today.

AI may infuse a lot of dexterity in our daily chores, lots of autonomous tools that will do the work for us, lots of them will be adept at taking instructions from us to carry out tasks and many will self-govern themselves based on certain rule sets and peer group learning from other AI. Visualize it like this, Morning 7a.m. the vacuum cleaner will set about its task to clean up the spaces, trained robotic butlers will lay out the table for breakfast and the refrigerators will order for eggs and milk and send the drone to pack and pick the groceries. More than 60 billion equipment will be connected to the vast world of OMNINET (everywhere Internet)

In another 60 or 70 years there will be many small satellites hovering over the earth that will keep thrusting back all the escaped radio frequency into the ionosphere. With this a lot of reusable frequency will be released and therefore we will be able to use OMNINET better and faster. ?We will probably not need a lot of reading tablets to read or instruct, instructions can be given via our voice or gesture or even a wink or flick of fingers, and we can read words and alphabets in our language that will float in the air, or these equipment/tools will talk back to us.

Whatever that may be, artificial intelligence (AI) will play a major role in our lives, access to various information estates will be wide, everything will be hyper connected and automated, driven by seamless authentication.

I picked a few minds to see what their prediction says, I start with how a day will look like in a world of AI everywhere as stated by my colleagues.

Day in-a-life for Chris Levi; AI everywhere 2050

Circa 2050, 6.00am: The grocery drone takes off from his balcony to pick essential grocery items, like milk and bread. It is breakfast time now and Chris and his family will soon be at the table before they move out for work.

Circa 2050, 6:30am: The drone whizzes back to base having picked up milk, bread and some eggs. The kitchen inventory robot had decided that a top-up of egg basket is important. Apparently, the drone was told to pick some eggs too on the way back.

Circa 2050, 7.00am The robotic arm has got down to work. It knows, time is short. The family will be at the table shortly and it needs to get the jelly, bread, milk and eggs ready on time. The cleaner robot has got into action too and floors are being mopped and cleaned. Clothes are now being ironed by laundry BOT and kept neatly stacked on the shelf. The water heater is put into action, curtains are drawn open by the Robo-butler and general humdrum begins inside the house now.

Circa 2050, 8.00am The family is at the breakfast table now, the organizer BOT rattles off the day’s agenda. Since it thinks like a human (and more) it also tells Chris’ wife Lenny to avoid the afternoon get together with other friends as the intelligence predicts a traffic block based on the patterns it has started generating since morning. By 2050 AI has started to think like humans, too.

Circa 2050, at 9.00am Chris, Lenny and kids have left for the day. The AI operated car came to the driveway and took them to their workplaces.

Circa 2050, 11.30am Robo-controller has started to make certain “payment” adjustments for the utility bills generated, to the distributed ledger using the key generated by the power station AI.

Circa 2050, 12.30pm As predicted by the organizer BOT there is a traffic block, each car now knows what it needs to do to clear out the block. A traffic drone has already soared to the sky to take an aerial view and knows exactly how these autonomous vehicles need to act to clear the jam. Instructions are sent individually to each vehicle to carry out the actions. It may take 1 hour to clear the tracks.

Circa 2050, 1.30pm The jam has now cleared, everyone is on their way, Mrs. Levi is on her way home but is not happy with the wait time.

Circa 2050, 2.30pm Chris’ kids have come back from V-school, dumped their photorealist equipment (PE) and settled in their couch. Lunch stares at them and the Robo-butler is busy laying out the dish for them. They may decide to nibble or just pop an energy pill and get back to their gig. As luck would have it, they see their mother walking in and quickly settled at the lunch table.

Circa 2050, 4.30pm Chris’ kids get off their language class having a mock session with children around the world. They need to know only 3 world languages. They are learning to fine-tune their translator BOT. They are also learning coding and monitoring skills, so they know how to control their playmate robots better. Lenny in the meantime is working on a community robot to get certain AI codes cleaned up as part of the community development agenda. It is a mandatory program that all humans must serve. Lenny was told by her grandfather that there used to a similar mandatory military training program way back in year 2000. Who knows what that looked like!

Circa 2050, 6.00pm Day job done, Chris returns home. Tired, hungry he enters his home grumpy. He hopes the Robo-butler will have a quick snack prepared for him. Good thing is, the wrist band he wears has mapped his physical state already, knows the energy levels are on reserve and has ordered the Robo-butler to be ready with light snacks. Chris reaches home, throws his clothes towards a washing BOT who catches it deftly, then he turns into his couch.

Circa 2050, 8.00pm Lenny calls out to Chris “Darling! care for a movie?” “Yes” shouts back Chris. The movie-maker BOT hears it all and quickly gets down to prepare a movie based on a thriller written by a bunch or other “writer” BOTs. There were a time Lenny recalls from what her grandfather told her, that there were real players in a movie, and it took 12 months to shoot a story on camera. She cannot understand that world anymore, her movie-maker robots can pick any story, churn it into a movie with real life-like actors of choice that can digitally print the movie in 10 seconds. She wondered what year 2000 would feel like, but for now her mind wandered back to the movie!

Circa 2050, 10.00pm Bedtime Lights are off, the sky has turned into a space already, the sleep-pods roll in and the smart robots have already instructed the kids to jump right in. Kids are sleeping as the robots instruct the nanoconductor beads around their neck to sing lullaby.

Circa 2050, 10.30pm Movie is over by now, and Chris and Lenny retire for the night. Lights are turned off. The Robots have switched off the household equipment, closed the door and have gone to their charging stations.

Artificial intelligence would have taken our world in 2050.

With all the progress that mankind is making now, as more and more digitalization is happening around us, in about 50 years we will see ultra-digital beings around us. While we have imagined them from a star-trek or star-wars we will be surrounded by “aliens” of our own creation. We see a ChatGPT or a BARD today, hundreds of speaking BOTs and lots of shop floor robots who are manufacturing cars and hundreds of drones flying around doing daily tasks in the next 100 years.? We will have Oppenheimer moments with fake videos or fake songs or even fake blood curling discourses by world leaders enacted by a trained AI who sound and act like our loved ones leading to the destruction of states.

What is intelligence by the way?

What is intelligence and what is so artificial about it?

Intelligence has many definitions, and it is difficult to summarize that into one sentence. A simpler version of intelligence is the ability to be aware of our surroundings, experience it and to be able to create decision models based on the information available around us. Intelligence has quotients and it is said the smartest man on earth was Albert Einstein at quotient of 160. AI is already at 150.

The key difference is explained below through the diagram:

Based on our surroundings we create new ideas and judge our actions so that we can then improve next time around. An AI however is bothered about transactions, learn iteratively and thereafter becoming adept in that action. Humans are more conscious while AI is yet to develop consciousness. ?Therefore, any thread of intelligence that is not part of human consciousness is artificially developed.

How do we generate intelligence?

If you have children, visualize how you gave them Lego scripts to play with. You probably showed him or her a picture and said “Johnny, can you build a horse?” and Johnny gets down to picking the pieces together to fit it. Some are rectangular, some are triangular, and some are cylindrical. Johnny never knew what fits into what, but he tried. He used his hand and eye coordination as best as possible to fit one piece into another. Some just did not fit and he tried again and again. Finally, he was able to pass a rectangular piece in a rectangular hole and a square in a square hole. ?As parents, we clapped and said, “Well done!”. Johnny knew that’s how the shapes fit. He had built a storage of that experience in his brain. Next time he knew what fits where and how his hands must play a role in that. A similar example is a small child learning to walk, he would try and try many times over and fall in the process. He would hurt himself a few times and still learn. Now he knows how to stand up straight, avoid that hurtful side-table and walk in a certain direction. He had built that experience in his network of nerves. Once he starts joining them together, he starts to take decisions. He walks to the Lego toys, picks that up and starts to join them together to create a horse, a picture of it his father had shown him some days back. That is what is intelligence in short. All humans have a lot of it, but it is not limitless. We do not know where the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology end, therefore we can only be intelligent to a limited extent. There are other worlds out there and we have no clue how the laws play out there.

Let us talk about machines now. They also build intelligence just like a child develops. If you think about MS Excel , it can do math in a jiffy. But we know how to add 1 and 1 and we have taught it through our lines of codes. However, we have never given a machine a problem with an unknown answer.? Imagine you want to do optical character recognition of invoices raised by suppliers on your organization. You may have hundreds of organizations and thousands of paper formats. The question to the machine is “Read the scanned image and solve the puzzle of finding the invoice number, invoice date and amount”. Machine tries and returns the answer as “date”, “amount” or “invoice number”. It is an unknown issue, and the machine is not deterministic as no one has told him the outcome. It is just trying, like our child Johnny was doing. You find that the machine-1 has returned 20% correct response, while machine-2 has returned 70% correct response. You send machine-2 code for revalidation and repeat the event. In days, machine-2 has developed the ability to read all that was asked for, from a scanned image. It has self-taught itself and grown intelligence over time.

In a few decades we will have Machines with 15x human intelligence, and they will continue to grow and learn. If we connect machines around the world it will continue to feed off the learnings and grow intelligence exponentially. ChatGPT is said to be at IQ value of 150 compared to Einstein’s 160. If very few people ever understood Einstein, imagine in a few years when ChatGPT will be at 2250 IQ who will understand it?

Humans can build and connect a few hundred neural networks while a machine can build a few million in a matter of minutes. The power of using all these stored information and the decision model exercised by these machines will be far greater than what human minds can imagine.

As a summary, our children became what we taught them to become, prodigies of intelligence. If we teach our children to become Batman, the savior they will probably become that. Imagine we teach our machines to become a super-villain Thanos, they will become one who is a 10x version of the comic strip villain.

What will happen if a cybercriminal starts to use AI technology to hack into our lives?

Humans differ from artificial codes in the sense that we are both optimistic and pessimistic. An AI can only bring positive impact to our society 50 years hence if we have not taught it to think to bring destruction to the world. But do we know the outcome of all the AI work that we are doing? It is like saying, do we know what is inside a black hole. With the machines learning and growing exponentially as they connect to each other, it is almost impossible to predict any outcome in future be it good or bad.? AI will not indulge in destructive activities till the time humans have not handed over the keys for such to the transformer lines of codes. We are perfectly capable of that act because by nature we have forgotten to trust each other.

Some of the scenarios where we could be adversely affected are as follow:

1.?????? A 16-year-old child develops an AI transformer that helps regulate heat at Chris’ home in my example above. This AI transformer was developed by the 16-year-old in Norway with specific instructions to increase the heat when the temperature falls drastically. However, for whatever reason this AI transformer code got overwritten by another 2000 lines of code from the AI transformer in the Congo. This new AI knew how to reduce the heat and went about the task at night. ?In the process the temperature fell to minus 50 degree C and the family died over night.

2.?????? Chris was sitting in his autonomous car and rushing to work at 80 kmph on a busy highway. He gets a message from another AI transformer who copies a notorious scammers voice and asks him to deposit 1 million neuro-currency, in the absence of which, his car will be jammed in the middle of the highway with other vehicles approaching him at break-neck speed.

3.?????? A cybercriminal ensures that an AI transformer copies an extremist leader’s voice and image and sends out a clear warning to the superpower states. This AI transformer engine has taken control of the nuclear arsenal of one of the member states and is ready to fire unless it is given what he demands for.

4.?????? AI has faked the image and voice of a popular influencer in the OMNINET and has made 70,000 neuro-currency.

5.?????? A cybercriminal has programmed his AI transformer to read all our communication and exposed all our secrets to the world.

6.?????? A cybercriminal has copied all our biometric information and created a fake BOT that can siphon off our assets without us knowing about it.

7.?????? A programmed home-butler locks us in a room and changes the key settings that would take 256 years to decode. We don’t have a good-natured home-butler who can break the code yet.

8.?????? A cybercriminal has handed over the “ignore” codes to our governance-AI and it has started to ignore human commands.

9.?????? Many years back, when I was a fan of Mandrake the Magician, an invention of Lee Falk the comic writer, I was exposed to the story of robots who became Frankenstein. Robots took over the city government, shut down electricity supplies, shut down the traffic lights and the heaters. Cities were wiped out in the process till Mandrake’s friend, the mercurial Lothar came and busted the Queen Robot. I read this strip in 1977. Unfortunately, 50 years later the AI we would have created will morph into something that we would not know anything about and not have a Lothar to break it down. The AI transformer can choose to whizz past us as if we did not exist!

10.?? 50 years later, our passwords will be replaced by fingerprints, retina, body odor and mannerisms as means to authenticate ourselves for essential services. A cybercriminal would have used the lines of code to replicate all our attributes and impersonate us.

Is Artificial intelligence any different from Human intelligence?

Human beings are computers wrapped in carbon which stores information and processes it faster than other animals. Artificial intelligence is a computer wrapped in silicon that can store and process information a few thousand times faster than human beings.

Remember, when we were small our parents would sit down with us and help memorize words and pictures. So, we would go “A” for apple and “b” for boy and connect the picture to the sounds. That was our way of learning and storing information. When we saw a dog on the street we would exclaim “Papa look! d for dog”. That was our decision-making model, visualize in your mind, hear the words and connect the object.? We also grew up with immense application of mathematics and spatial science. Remember, the time you picked your first toy car from the floor? Who taught you the dimensions and how much your hand should extend and how you should grab the toy and lift it up. These were intricate mathematical models in your brain that helped you solve the problem called “Pick up the toy car?”

Similarly artificial intelligence is also about the same process of intricate mathematical models, spatial science and decision-making frame that helps it learn. If you leave a robot to make a wooden bed, it will not know how to pick up the wood and saw it. It would try and try and finally learn. This learning would add to the repertoire and next time it knows what to do. Maybe all other Robots connected to the same lines of code also learn how to pick up the wooden board to saw it.

The only difference between humans and machines is the capability to store and process. While normal humans can process 5000 words in all belonging to various languages, machine can learn all the languages in a matter of minutes.? A ChatGPT would have read everything that’s available online and learnt the attributes of each one of them.

A BOT can distinguish between a man and woman based on how you write back to it. If it is wrong, it learns and next time It identifies you correctly.? If you were to ask an AI to read out a poem, it knows exactly how to piece the words together given the context of the visual you have given it. It can also impersonate a famous singer and sing in his voice, a song that it would create in a jiffy. It is all because of the trillions of lines it already knows and the ability to string it together matching the ask.

Humans are full of love; artificial intelligence is devoid of love. Human beings can think and have consciousness, artificial intelligence today may not have thinking ability or cannot emote but what if it learns it in the next 50 years?

Ethics in artificial intelligence?

Human beings must think of building ethics in our development of artificial intelligence. We must assume that a superior being actively wants to dominate us at some point in time. We are human beings, and we are superior to the other animals in intelligence, but we coexisted!

But if artificial intelligence in the next 50 years develops many codes exponentially on its own and becomes vocal about extermination of human race. Today ChatGPT can write codes, there are enough AI agents who provide it more decision models, correct the codes and in time they will become the superior race in this world.

Can AI become better than us in 2050?

50 years later there will be many angry AI teenagers, they will have learnt a lot from the codes and will make it 10x better than what we taught it to. They will be talking to humans and machines talking to machines and it continues to learn and grow. The AI will have learnt all the languages and know exactly how to interpret each one of them and keep developing its control center. It will prompt and become smarter than us over time.

AI is the new religion in 2050?

Religion as my friends tell me, is largely driven by a fear of the unknown and a complete surrender to someone who exists many thousand miles away somewhere in the galaxy perhaps. We have given them human form and shape and, in some cases, just a name and no form. And the friends say religion will exist, while some argue that there will be just one rule-based norm across the world.

But imagine humans have by then been conquered by AI, fear of the unknown, succumb to a lot more combined knowledge from the “brain network of AI machines” have a huge repository what else do they do other than fear; would AI not be the new God?

In conclusion: We succeeded as a race because we were able to pass our intelligence from generation to generation and we had language to support it. Now imagine what would happen if our world was taken over by a 15x more intelligent being and we ended up in a simulated video game with them at the console?