The two quotes you gave say two pretty different things. What Yudkowsky said about the time-scale of self improvement being weeks or hours, is controversial.
My problem with Luke’s quote was the “moments later” part.
I took that as hyperbole. If I were meant to take it literally, then yes, I’d object—but I have no trouble believing that a superintelligent AI would be out of there in a matter of hours to minutes, modulo bandwidth limits, which is ‘instant’ enough for my purposes. Humans suck at computer security.
Yes, applying the SI definition of a moment as 1/2π seconds and the ANSI upper bound of a plural before you must change units, we can derive that he was either claiming world takeover in less than 10/(2π)^1/2 ≈ 3.9894 seconds, or speaking somewhat loosely.
Right, and I’m saying: the “moments later” part of what Luke said is not something that should be surprising or controversial, given the premises. It does not require any thinking that can’t be done in advance, which means the only limiting input is bandwidth, which is both plentiful and becoming more plentiful every year.
Right, and I’m saying: the “moments later” part of what Luke said is not something that should be surprising or controversial, given the premises.
The premise was a superhuman intelligence? I don’t see how it could create a large enough botnet, or find enough exploits, in order to be everywhere moments later. Sounds like magic to me (mind you, a complete layman).
If I approximate “superintelligence” as NSA, then I don’t see how the NSA could have a trojan everywhere moments after the POTUS asked them to take over the Internet. Now I could go further and imagine the POTUS asking the NSA to take it over within 10 years in order to account for the subjective speed with which a superintelligence might think. But I strongly doubt that such a speed could make up for the data the NSA already possess and which the superintelligence still needs to acquire. It also does not make up for the thousands of drones (humans in meatspace) that the NSA controls. And since the NSA can’t take over the Internet within moments I believe it is very extreme to claim that a superintelligence can. Though it might be possible within days.
I hope you don’t see this as an attack. I honestly don’t see how that could be possible.
This is not magic, I am not a layman, and your beliefs about computer security are wildly misinformed. Putting trojans on large fractions of the computers on the internet is currently within the reach of, and is actually done by, petty criminals acting alone. While this does involve a fair amount of thinking time, all of this thinking goes into advance preparation, which could be done while still in an AI-box or in advance of an order.
This is not magic, I am not a layman, and your beliefs about computer security are wildly misinformed. Putting trojans on large fractions of the computers on the internet is currently within the reach of, and is actually done by, petty criminals acting alone.
Within moments? I don’t take your word for this, sorry. The only possibility that comes to my mind is by somehow hacking the Windows update servers and then somehow forcefully install new “updates” without user permission.
While this does involve a fair amount of thinking time, all of this thinking goes into advance preparation, which could be done while still in an AI-box or in advance of an order.
So if I uploaded you onto some alien computer, and you had a billion years of subjective time to think about it, then within moments after you got an “Internet” connection you could put a trojan on most computers of that alien society? How would you e.g. figure out zero day exploits of software that you don’t even know exists?
Well, what’s going to slow it down? If you have a backdoor or an exploit, to take over a computer requires a few milliseconds for communications latency and a few milliseconds to run the code to execute the takeover. At this point the new zombie becomes a vector for further infection, you have exponential growth and BOOM!
The only possibility that comes to my mind is by somehow hacking the Windows update servers and then somehow forcefully install new “updates” without user permission.
Wouldn’t have to be Windows; any popular software package with live updates would do, like Acrobat or Java or any major antivirus package. Or you could find a vulnerability that allows arbitrary code execution in any popular push notification service; find one in Apache or a comparably popular Web service, then corrupt all the servers you can find; exploit one in a popular browser, if you can suborn something like Google or Amazon’s front page… there’s lots of stuff you could do. If you have hours instead of moments, phishing attacks and the like become practical, and things get even more fun.
How would you e.g. figure out zero day exploits of software that you don’t even know exists?
Well, presumably you’re running in an environment that has some nontrivial fraction of that software floating around, or at least has access to repos with it. And there’s always fuzzing.
I don’t see how the NSA could have a trojan everywhere moments after the POTUS asked them to take over the Internet.
Given a backdoor or an appropriate zero-day exploit, I would estimate that it would take no longer than a few minutes to gain control over most of the computers connected to the ’net if you’re not worried about detection. It’s not hard. Random people routinely build large botnets without any superhuman abilities.
Most computers are not directly connected to the internet.
Assuming we are not talking about computers in cars and factory control systems, this is a pretty meaningless statement. Yes, most computers sit behind routers, but then basically all computers on the ’net sit behind routers, no one is “directly” connected.
Besides, routers are computers and can be taken over as well.
But not by that zero-day microsoft exploit you found. If your router is a cisco system, you need a cisco zero-day exploit to access the machines behind it, or some other way of bypassing the firewall. Sure, it could take over all the already vulnerable computers, the same ones which are already compromised by botnets. But I object to calling these “most of the computers connected to the ’net”.
But not by that zero-day microsoft exploit you found
The original scenario discussed was the NSA taking over the internet. I assume that the NSA has an extensive collection of backdoors and exploits (cf. Snowden) for Microsoft and Linux and Cisco, etc.
Yes well I thin XiXiDu did himself a disfavor there. If Snowden is to be believed and as various state-sponsored botnets (Stuxnet, Flame, BadBIOS(?)) have shown, the NSA has already “taken over” the internet. They may not have root access on any arbitrary internet-connected machine, but they could get it if they wanted.
My objection (and his?) is against the claim that an AI could replicate this capability in “moments,” according to the “because superhuman!” line of reasoning. I find that bogus.
My objection (and his?) is against the claim that an AI could replicate this capability in “moments,” according to the “because superhuman!” line of reasoning. I find that bogus.
An AI probably wouldn’t need to decompile anything—given the kind of optimizations that one could apply, there’s no particularly strong reason to think one would be any less comfortable in native machine code or, say, Java bytecode than in source. The only reason we are is that it’s closer to natural language and we’re bad at keeping track of a lot of disaggregated state.
That is a monumentally difficult undertaking, unfeasible with current hardware limitations
I think you underestimate the state of the art, such as the SAT/SMT-solver revolution in computer security. They automatically find exploits all the time, against OSes and libraries and APIs.
I think you underestimate the state of the art, such as the SAT/SMT-solver revolution in computer security. They automatically find exploits all the time, against OSes and libraries and APIs.
I think you miss my point. These SAT solvers are extremely expensive, and don’t scale well to large code bases. You can look to the literature to see the state of the art: using large clusters for long-running analysis on small code bases or isolated sections of a library. They do not and cannot with available resources scale up to large scale analysis of an entire OS or network stack … if they did, we humans would have done that already.
So to be clear, this UFAI breakout scenario is assuming the AI already has access to massive amounts of computing hardware, which it can re-purpose to long-duration HPC applications while escaping detection. And even if you find that realistic, I still wouldn’t use the word “momentarily.”
I think you miss my point. These SAT solvers are extremely expensive, and don’t scale well to large code bases. You can look to the literature to see the state of the art: using large clusters for long-running analysis on small code bases or isolated sections of a library. They do not and cannot with available resources scale up to large scale analysis of an entire OS or network stack … if they did, we humans would have done that already.
They have done that already. For example, this paper: “We implement our approach using a popular graph database and demonstrate its efficacy by identifying 18 previously unknown vulnerabilities in the source code of the Linux kernel.”
You can look to the literature to see the state of the art: using large clusters for long-running analysis on small code bases or isolated sections of a library.
Large clusters like… the ones that an AI would be running on?
They do not and cannot with available resources scale up to large scale analysis of an entire OS or network stack … if they did, we humans would have done that already.
They don’t have to scale although that may be possible given increases in computing power (you only need to find an exploit somewhere, not all exploits everywhere), and I am skeptical we humans would, in fact, ‘have done that already’. That claim seems to prove way too much: are existing static code analysis tools applied everywhere? Are existing fuzzers applied everywhere?
It requires an infeasible amount of computation for us humans to do.
Um. Humans—in real life—do run security audits of software. It’s nothing rare or unusual. Frequently these audits are assisted by automated tools (e.g. checking for buffer overruns, etc.). Again, this is happening right now in real life and there are no “infeasible amount of computation” problems.
Doing an audit to catch all vulnerabilities is monstrously hard. But finding some vulnerabilities is a perfectly straightforward technical problem.
It happens routinely that people develop new and improved vulnerability detectors that can quickly find vulnerabilities in existing codebases. I would be unsurprised if better optimization engines in general lead to better vulnerability detectors.
My problem with Luke’s quote was the “moments later” part.
I took that as hyperbole. If I were meant to take it literally, then yes, I’d object—but I have no trouble believing that a superintelligent AI would be out of there in a matter of hours to minutes, modulo bandwidth limits, which is ‘instant’ enough for my purposes. Humans suck at computer security.
Yes, applying the SI definition of a moment as 1/2π seconds and the ANSI upper bound of a plural before you must change units, we can derive that he was either claiming world takeover in less than 10/(2π)^1/2 ≈ 3.9894 seconds, or speaking somewhat loosely.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Right, and I’m saying: the “moments later” part of what Luke said is not something that should be surprising or controversial, given the premises. It does not require any thinking that can’t be done in advance, which means the only limiting input is bandwidth, which is both plentiful and becoming more plentiful every year.
The premise was a superhuman intelligence? I don’t see how it could create a large enough botnet, or find enough exploits, in order to be everywhere moments later. Sounds like magic to me (mind you, a complete layman).
If I approximate “superintelligence” as NSA, then I don’t see how the NSA could have a trojan everywhere moments after the POTUS asked them to take over the Internet. Now I could go further and imagine the POTUS asking the NSA to take it over within 10 years in order to account for the subjective speed with which a superintelligence might think. But I strongly doubt that such a speed could make up for the data the NSA already possess and which the superintelligence still needs to acquire. It also does not make up for the thousands of drones (humans in meatspace) that the NSA controls. And since the NSA can’t take over the Internet within moments I believe it is very extreme to claim that a superintelligence can. Though it might be possible within days.
I hope you don’t see this as an attack. I honestly don’t see how that could be possible.
This is not magic, I am not a layman, and your beliefs about computer security are wildly misinformed. Putting trojans on large fractions of the computers on the internet is currently within the reach of, and is actually done by, petty criminals acting alone. While this does involve a fair amount of thinking time, all of this thinking goes into advance preparation, which could be done while still in an AI-box or in advance of an order.
Within moments? I don’t take your word for this, sorry. The only possibility that comes to my mind is by somehow hacking the Windows update servers and then somehow forcefully install new “updates” without user permission.
So if I uploaded you onto some alien computer, and you had a billion years of subjective time to think about it, then within moments after you got an “Internet” connection you could put a trojan on most computers of that alien society? How would you e.g. figure out zero day exploits of software that you don’t even know exists?
Well, what’s going to slow it down? If you have a backdoor or an exploit, to take over a computer requires a few milliseconds for communications latency and a few milliseconds to run the code to execute the takeover. At this point the new zombie becomes a vector for further infection, you have exponential growth and BOOM!
Wouldn’t have to be Windows; any popular software package with live updates would do, like Acrobat or Java or any major antivirus package. Or you could find a vulnerability that allows arbitrary code execution in any popular push notification service; find one in Apache or a comparably popular Web service, then corrupt all the servers you can find; exploit one in a popular browser, if you can suborn something like Google or Amazon’s front page… there’s lots of stuff you could do. If you have hours instead of moments, phishing attacks and the like become practical, and things get even more fun.
Well, presumably you’re running in an environment that has some nontrivial fraction of that software floating around, or at least has access to repos with it. And there’s always fuzzing.
Also, nowadays if you can suborn the cell towers taking over all the smartphones becomes fast and easy.
When you are a layman talking to experts, you should actually listen. Don’t make us feel like we’re wasting our time.
Care to address his valid response point in the 2nd paragraph?
Nornagest already answered it; the sets of software in and outside the box aren’t disjoint.
Given a backdoor or an appropriate zero-day exploit, I would estimate that it would take no longer than a few minutes to gain control over most of the computers connected to the ’net if you’re not worried about detection. It’s not hard. Random people routinely build large botnets without any superhuman abilities.
Most computers are not directly connected to the internet.
Assuming we are not talking about computers in cars and factory control systems, this is a pretty meaningless statement. Yes, most computers sit behind routers, but then basically all computers on the ’net sit behind routers, no one is “directly” connected.
Besides, routers are computers and can be taken over as well.
But not by that zero-day microsoft exploit you found. If your router is a cisco system, you need a cisco zero-day exploit to access the machines behind it, or some other way of bypassing the firewall. Sure, it could take over all the already vulnerable computers, the same ones which are already compromised by botnets. But I object to calling these “most of the computers connected to the ’net”.
The original scenario discussed was the NSA taking over the internet. I assume that the NSA has an extensive collection of backdoors and exploits (cf. Snowden) for Microsoft and Linux and Cisco, etc.
Yes well I thin XiXiDu did himself a disfavor there. If Snowden is to be believed and as various state-sponsored botnets (Stuxnet, Flame, BadBIOS(?)) have shown, the NSA has already “taken over” the internet. They may not have root access on any arbitrary internet-connected machine, but they could get it if they wanted.
My objection (and his?) is against the claim that an AI could replicate this capability in “moments,” according to the “because superhuman!” line of reasoning. I find that bogus.
Let me suggest a way:
(1) Gain control of a single machine
(2) Decompile the OS code
(3) Run a security audit on the OS, find exploits
Even easier if the OS is open-sourced.
An AI probably wouldn’t need to decompile anything—given the kind of optimizations that one could apply, there’s no particularly strong reason to think one would be any less comfortable in native machine code or, say, Java bytecode than in source. The only reason we are is that it’s closer to natural language and we’re bad at keeping track of a lot of disaggregated state.
That is a monumentally difficult undertaking, unfeasible with current hardware limitations, certainly impossible in the “moments” timescale.
I think you underestimate the state of the art, such as the SAT/SMT-solver revolution in computer security. They automatically find exploits all the time, against OSes and libraries and APIs.
I think you miss my point. These SAT solvers are extremely expensive, and don’t scale well to large code bases. You can look to the literature to see the state of the art: using large clusters for long-running analysis on small code bases or isolated sections of a library. They do not and cannot with available resources scale up to large scale analysis of an entire OS or network stack … if they did, we humans would have done that already.
So to be clear, this UFAI breakout scenario is assuming the AI already has access to massive amounts of computing hardware, which it can re-purpose to long-duration HPC applications while escaping detection. And even if you find that realistic, I still wouldn’t use the word “momentarily.”
They have done that already. For example, this paper: “We implement our approach using a popular graph database and demonstrate its efficacy by identifying 18 previously unknown vulnerabilities in the source code of the Linux kernel.”
Large clusters like… the ones that an AI would be running on?
They don’t have to scale although that may be possible given increases in computing power (you only need to find an exploit somewhere, not all exploits everywhere), and I am skeptical we humans would, in fact, ‘have done that already’. That claim seems to prove way too much: are existing static code analysis tools applied everywhere? Are existing fuzzers applied everywhere?
Why in the world would a security audit of a bunch of code be “monumentally difficult” for an AI..?
It requires an infeasible amount of computation for us humans to do. Why do you suppose it would be different for an AI?
Um. Humans—in real life—do run security audits of software. It’s nothing rare or unusual. Frequently these audits are assisted by automated tools (e.g. checking for buffer overruns, etc.). Again, this is happening right now in real life and there are no “infeasible amount of computation” problems.
Doing an audit to catch all vulnerabilities is monstrously hard. But finding some vulnerabilities is a perfectly straightforward technical problem.
It happens routinely that people develop new and improved vulnerability detectors that can quickly find vulnerabilities in existing codebases. I would be unsurprised if better optimization engines in general lead to better vulnerability detectors.