A recent news report about Alexa telling a young girl to do a dangerous stunt is a reminder that we need to be wary of the things that AI tells us to do, including in the home and even while riding in AI-based self-driving cars.
Was it a hack by some nefarious hacker that sought to bring about a bit of outrageous evildoing?Turns out that Alexa came up with this craziness by simply culling through its large database and searching the web, looking for something to provide as a “challenge” for the girl as based on a simple verbal request by her in seeking to undertake an interesting challenge that might be fun to do.
So, Alexa used its AI search techniques to discover physical related challenges that had been previously posted and landed upon the prong-and-penny challenge. This was then dutifully shoveled out to the Echo Dot and into the waiting ears of the 10-year-old and the mother. What makes this even more deceptive is that the vocalizing AI device is “right” some or much of the time. If you ask what year Washington crossed the Delaware River, you get the right answer. If you ask what the capital of New York is, you get the right answer. And so on.
Another frightening element is that this was not just a factual question-and-answer type of scenario. Suppose you asked what the population of Idaho was. An incorrect answer would not likely be life-threatening. The aspect that this was a provided challenge, essentially a set of instructions, makes it really disconcerting. Children are taught to follow instructions, and the authoritative AI vocalizing system is bound to be perceived as an authority to be obeyed.
Some parents refuse to allow such systems into their homes. That might seem like a prudent precaution, but of course, the kids can nonetheless access such systems on their parent-provided smartphones that the kids have with them at all times. Welcome to the planet of no-win. There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.
You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.One aspect to immediately discuss entails the fact that the AI involved in today’s AI driving systems is not sentient.
A teenager gets into an AI-based self-driving car to get a lift to school. The parents normally use their human-driven car to take their teen to the campus, but this morning the parents are busy and are fine with having the teen make use of a self-driving car instead. A teen riding to school is perchance bored during the drive and asks the AI for something fun to do. The AI system searches a database and the web to discover something that has been previously posted and proclaimed to be fun.Imagine that the AI tells the teen to go ahead and open the windows of the self-driving car, stick their head out, wave their arms, and scream out obscenities.
You have to keep in mind that there isn’t any kind of AI today that has a commonsense facility, not at least in the semblance of common sense that we humans have. If an adult told a teen to do something like this, you would rightfully be darned irked at the adult. The adult ought to have more common sense than to tell a teen to do this perilous antic.The lack of common sense is a serious concern about where AI is going and how it is going to be deployed.
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