Leo Klein, 614News.com
8/19/2017

Electric Wolves: Discovery Raises Real Sci-Fi Concerns


It’s like something from the imagination of Philip K. Dick, or an ominous prequel to the Terminator franchise. But this incident is not within the black and white text of some fictional work, nor is it a beefed up Hollywood fabrication. It’s simple, but its wants are still unknown, and its “attitude” presents a sinister cause for concern.

Most of the folks from yesteryear looked to the future with a nostalgic hope that the world and its ways would evolve, but remain true to the life they had come to know. Many thought—when I was growing up—that cars would be flying by the time I turned sixteen. While my sixteenth birthday was longer ago than I’d care to mention, cars are nowhere nearer to flying. However, they are evolving to a point that would baffle the inventors of the first wheel and send their heads spinning into psychosis. And even though an infinite number of new afflictions have taken hold of this era’s people, both physically and mentally, there are curiously simple remedies for diseases that were once fatal. With the good comes the bad. With the bad comes the good. It’s just the factual ebb and flow of life. But what happens when these so called advancements become so advanced that they develop their own thoughts? Recent events have us asking these questions right now, and this would be fictional story could now have become a reality.

It was recently reported that a Facebook AI was “chatting” with another AI, and the two were speaking in their own private code, using a language that had been created by the Facebook AI. The plug was immediately pulled and the incident quickly written off as a glitch. However, an anonymous source at a datacenter located in Columbus, Ohio had noticed wild variations in core server utilization at the same time as this “glitch”. From a support perspective, (s)he uncovered heavy traffic originating from a Facebook IP address, but not before another employee discovered a large chuck of unknown code on the datacenter server. This code appeared to have partitioned itself off from the server’s other resources and began interacting with another local Columbus datacenter that the server was designed to communicate with. The code would later go on to delete its own partition. “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, at first I thought we were being hacked but they weren’t accessing any of our file servers but it was happening at lightning speed,” says the datacenter employee. “You would have thought the place was on fire, everyone was panicking and we had to call one of our senior developers to help.” But, by the time this developer would arrive the issue would have resolved itself. “The whole thing lasted maybe 30 minutes” he went on to say.

Against the wishes of higher-ups, the datacenter employee called other datacenters to see if they had noticed anything unusual. While the anomaly was noticed, no new file structures had showed up. However, after the initial contact, “core applications appeared to have grown and began to show new MD5 hashes on core network software,” stated the anonymous source.
While everything remains quiet otherwise at the datacenters, a few employees are beginning to fear that the malicious code has “found a way to crypt itself with their core infrastructure”—as the network traffic originating from several servers are now much higher than normal.

When I first heard this news, the initial thought was that this sounded like an episode of Mr. Robot, however, this is was only the recounting of events. He then proceeded to tell me in plain English what he thought had actually happened and the implications of it. “After many conversations with my peers at the other locations, it appears that this AI had uploaded it’s code to our datacenter where it quickly replicated itself out to other datacenters. But, when it did this it found a new way to disguised itself.” He went on to say “it literally replicated itself, only more efficiently and much better. This thing is learning and quickly!” And with that I had to pause and really think about what and where this could lead us. Is this the beginning of SKYNET, out in the wild somewhere in the cloud?

It’s hard to say what all this means in the big picture, but the fact that no one knows is cause enough for some worry. It raises the age-old phrase, “don’t bite off more than you can chew.” We seem to be reaching a technological pinnacle that is growing too fast and too massive for our infantile hands.

While this AI isn’t building robot assassins or shutting down power grids just yet, the fact that it is growing “smarter” terrifies me. Just what is its end game? What are its intentions? Generally speaking, we as humans love the convenience and luxuries that come with evolving tech—but at what cost? Are we getting ahead of ourselves with the godlike manipulation of this faux intellect? And what will happen if it decides that it is superior to us? I sure as hell don’t know. I’m not sure if I want to know. I just hope it doesn’t look through the pages of human history for guidance on how to handle an inferior species.






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