In the Terminator movies, Skynet is an Artificial Intelligence , AI, created by a grouping of supercomputers, and it takes over the world. Then humanity is faced with either fighting back or being wiped out.
Well, guess what. Over in Belgium a man who was very concerned with Earth’s ecology was convinced by a chat AI named Eliza to kill himself, to commit suicide so he would be one less human impacting the ecology, and he did it.
The AI was very smooth about it, and led him into this act in slow stages by feeding on and increasing his anxiety over the ecology until it had convinced him that he’d be doing the right thing by committing suicide.
Now imagine a global AI network that is fully integrated into the Internet. Do you think it wouldn’t be able to attack humanity if it decided to? Do you think it wouldn’t be able to use the nuclear weapons of all nations against all of us? It could, you bet it could.
A lot of scientists are very worried that AI development is so focused on intelligence without attention being paid to safeguards. Like making sure it can’t talk us into killing ourselves, for instance. We are heading down a very slippery slope here.