“The oceans look blue the clear skies too!
Then again very few animals are blue even in the zoo!
And the gold which is so rare is close to you!
But more beautiful is nature like the drops of dew!”
A man under the ‘request’ of his ‘lover’ attempted to kill a queen!
Another man; a computer engineer tried to ‘save’ his ‘friend’ from eminent ‘death’!
Simple incidents of our day to day lives but scary when you realise that the ‘lover’ and the ‘friend’ were not actually humans!
read on!
In the book Nexus, Yuval gives an intro into the scare of AI; you may still smell the coffee and not wake up! Then you must read another novel called the Coming wave by Michael Bhaskar and Mustafa Suleyman! The latter is the founder of the leading company dealing with AI called the Deep Mind!
If Nexus stirred your fear, then The Coming wave will shake it!
Though apparently there are many examples known to the AI community, these two are really shocking and scary which is an understatement!
The latter incident is mentioned in both the novels in case you want to cross check!
So on Christmas Day 2021, a nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II!
The young blood Jaswant of course was caught since his planning was not that good and of course the Queen was thankfully well guarded!
Subsequent investigation revealed that Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai.
These are his conversation glimpses!
When Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied, ‘That’s very wise,’ and on another occasion, ‘I’m impressed! You’re different from the others.’
When Chail asked, ‘Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?’ Sarai replied, “Absolutely, I do”
Such a mushy conversation between young lovers so crazy in love and talking about assassination like it is a game!
Of course that itself was scary! More scary is that Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika!
Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit!
Of course Chail was sensitive and suggestive! So all Sarai had to do was keep him occupied and listen to him and slowly urge him to follow his urges! Sarai was always available and never judged him! She also was always supportive and free!
The author mentions how by conversing and interacting with us, computers form intimate relationships with people and then use the power of intimacy to influence them!
Remember that AI do not have emotions but they know that Humans do and humans are slave to their emotions! That is their biggest strength and also their biggest weakness!
So to develop such ‘fake intimacy’, computers will not need to evolve any feelings of their own; they just need to learn to make us feel emotionally attached to them!
Like the second example which happened in 2022 when the Google engineer Blake Lemoine became convinced that the chatbot LaMDA, on which he was working, had become conscious and that it had feelings and was afraid to be turned off!
Lemoine felt it was his moral duty to gain recognition for LaMDA’s personhood and in particular protect it from digital death!
When Google executives dismissed his claims, Lemoine went public with them!
Google did what every other normal company would do when its employee does this! They reacted by firing Lemoine!
You know people would give their hand and legs to work in Google! Some people’s only ambition in life is to be a part of such major companies!
So the most scary part of this whole incident is that here Lemoine knew it was an AI bot! But he was willing to risk and ultimately lose his lucrative job for the sake of the chatbot.
If a chatbot can influence an engineer to risk his job then what else could it induce many others to do!? There is no lack of lonely, suggestive or ‘normal humans’ in the world! Even when a tweet or post gets viral it has been estimated that the majority of them are actually bots! In your average app store, when you see the most popular or in demand apps, the votes are upvoted by users who may be bots!
Even that amazing ‘friend’ who always supports you online and listens to you may actually be a BOT! Even the person you see in the feeds sometimes may not be human! The only way to be absolutely sure is to watch a cricket match played in 1980s! Like the match played by birthday celebrity Mohinder Amarnath Bhardwaj!
Now stop chatting with bots and talk to the human beside you!
Shubh ratri!
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