AI’s awful week is a peek into the future

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Hello reader,

There’s an old Silicon Valley joke that goes: If buildings were constructed the same way developers wrote software, the first woodpecker that comes along would destroy civilization.

That pecker has arrived, and it is AI.

Except that’s not really true. Everyone assumes it’s AI, but it’s still people that cause problems – AI is just uncovering those issues.

Last Wednesday, researchers from two independent security firms – US-based Calif and Israeli-American company Wiz – announced that they had found vulnerabilities in a decades-old version of PHP, the software that handles security credentials for an estimated 70% of all websites. These flaws, which were discovered via AI tools, could be used by hackers to completely take over a web server.

This resulted in no small amount of panic globally, with some of the offered solutions arguably exacerbating the panic. At least one cybersecurity company has been advising firms to checks note> take everything offline.

Image credit: Made by Ulla/Tech in Asia with the help of AI

Sure, let’s do that. After all, governments and companies have been pushing for years to take everything we do online. So let’s just turn it all off – no problem.

I expected a much better response, although kudos to the IT teams around the world who worked to roll out a patch.

But this isn’t the first time that such a vulnerability has been detected, and it won’t be the last. It was also inevitable – humans have been writing buggy code for decades.

That AI is able to find these previously unknown bugs is a blessing, albeit an incredibly expensive and potentially dangerous one. But it is better to find these errors now instead of when something bigger – like quantum computing – comes along.

The panic, however, just adds to the growing number of reasons why people are freaking out over AI. Many people don’t understand that many of the problems “caused” by AI are nothing more than this new technology unearthing our own mistakes. And while the cybersecurity error was bad, it’s nothing compared to some of the issues waiting on the horizon.

Ride that bandwagon, baby!

Let’s start with the money issue. Humans – not AI – have been dumping investments into chips, data centers and models development for almost three years now, and no one is making a profit.

Where this is all going