Xjyuk

We often hear that artificial intelligence may harm or even kill humans, so it might prove dangerous.

How could artificial intelligence harm us?

tl;dr

There are many valid reasons why people might fear (or better be concerned about) AI, not all involve robots and apocalyptic scenarios.

To better illustrate these concerns, I'll try to split them into three categories.

Conscious AI

This is the type of AI that your question is referring to. A super-intelligent conscious AI that will destroy/enslave humanity. This is mostly brought to us by science-fiction. Some notable Hollywood examples are "The terminator", "The Matrix", "Age of Ultron". The most influential novels were written by Isaac Asimov and are referred to as the "Robot series" (which includes "I, robot", which was also adapted as a movie).

The basic premise under most of these works are that AI will evolve to a point where it becomes conscious and will surpass humans in intelligence. While Hollywood movies mainly focus on the robots and the battle between them and humans, not enough emphasis is given to the actual AI (i.e. the "brain" controlling them). As a side note, because of the narrative, this AI is usually portrayed as supercomputer controlling everything (so that the protagonists have a specific target). Not enough exploration has been made on "ambiguous intelligence" (which I think is more realistic).

In the real world, AI is focused on solving specific tasks! An AI agent that is capable of solving problems from different domains (e.g. understanding speech and processing images and driving and ... - like humans are) is referred to as General Artificial Intelligence and is required for AI being able to "think" and become conscious.

Realistically, we are a loooooooong way from General Artificial Intelligence! That being said there is no evidence on why this can't be achieved in the future. So currently, even if we are still in the infancy of AI, we have no reason to believe that AI won't evolve to a point where it is more intelligent than humans.

Using AI with malicious intent

Even though an AI conquering the world is a long way from happening there are several reasons to be concerned with AI today, that don't involve robots!
The second category I want to focus a bit more on is several malicious uses of today's AI.

I'll focus only on AI applications that are available today. Some examples of AI that can be used for malicious intent:

• DeepFake: a technique for imposing someones face on an image a video of another person. This has gained popularity recently with celebrity porn and can be used to generate fake news and hoaxes. Sources: 1, 2, 3




• With the use of mass surveillance systems and facial recognition software capable of recognizing millions of faces per second, AI can be used for mass surveillance. Even though when we think of mass surveillance we think of China, many western cities like London, Atlanta and Berlin are among the most-surveilled cities in the world. China has taken things a step further by adopting the social credit system, an evaluation system for civilians which seems to be taken straight out of the pages of George Orwell's 1984.




• Influencing people through social media. Aside from recognizing user's tastes with the goal of targeted marketing and add placements (a common practice by many internet companies), AI can be used malisciously to influence people's voting (among other things). Sources: 1, 2, 3.




• Hacking.




• Military applications, e.g. drone attacks, missile targeting systems.

Adverse effects of AI

This category is pretty subjective, but the development of AI might carry some adverse side-effects. The distinction between this category and the previous is that these effects, while harmful, aren't done intentionally; rather they occur with the development of AI. Some examples are:

• Jobs becoming redundant. As AI becomes better, many jobs will be replaced by AI. Unfortunately there are not many things that can be done about this, as most technological developments have this side-effect (e.g. agricultural machinery caused many farmers to lose their jobs, automation replaced many factory workers, computers did the same).




• Reinforcing the bias in our data. This is a very interesting category, as AI (and especially Neural Networks) are only as good as the data they are trained on and have a tendency of perpetuating and even enhancing different forms of social biases, already existing in the data. There are many examples of networks exhibiting racist and sexist behavior. Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4.

In addition to the other answers, I would like to add to nuking cookie factory example:

Machine learning AIs basically try to fulfill a goal described by humans. For example, humans create an AI running a cookie factory. The goal they implement is to sell as many cookies as possible for the highest profitable margin.

Now, imagine an AI which is sufficiently powerful. This AI will notice that if he nukes all other cookie factories, everybody has to buy cookies in his factory, making sales rise and profits higher.

So, the human error here is giving no penalty for using violence in the algorithm. This is easily overlooked because humans didn't expect the algorithm to come to this conclusion.

I would say the biggest real threat would be the unbalancing/disrupting we are already seeing. The changes of putting 90% the country out of work are real, and the results (which will be even more uneven distribution of wealth) are terrifying if you think them through.

If a robot is similar to a human machine interface the device is the same like a remote controlled car. It's possible to discuss with the operator behind the joystick and negotiate about a wishful behavior. Remote controlled robots are safe inventions because their actions can be traced back to humans and their motivation can be anticipated. They can be used to improve the daily life, and it's funny to play with them.

In contrast, some robots aren't controlled by joysticks but are working with an internal dice generator. The dice toy is known from it's social role in gambling but it has also a mystical meaning. Usually, a random generator is strongly connected with chaotic behavior which is controlled by dark forces outside the influence of humans. An electronic dice built into a robot and improved with learning algorithm is the opposite of a human machine interface, but it's potential troublemaker because the randomly controlled robot will play games with humans which can't be anticipated. It's not possible to predict the next number of a dice, therefore the robot will behave abrupt as well.

The connection between randomly controlled games and negative social impact was explained in the following sentence.

quote: “In many traditional non-Western societies gamblers may pray to
the gods for success and explain wins and losses in terms of divine
will. “ Binde, Per. "Gambling and religion: Histories of concord and
conflict." Journal of Gambling Issues 20 (2007): 145-165.