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Pausing AI development? As if we could...

When we hear of a new way in which artificial intelligence (AI) can risk humanity, or even just move someone’s cheese, the debate often changes to whether or not we should pause AI development until some impact analysis is carried out, or some regulation kicks in.

I do not think that pausing AI development is even a plausible option to be considered. History has shown that technology never stops. We have tried this in areas that are much riskier for humanity, and without much success. We should accept that Humanity is insufficiently consensus-driven, and the stakeholders in AI technologies have too many easy ways to bypass bans, and too many good reasons to do so. Yes, there is serious lobbying promoting this pausing option, but I would argue that most is for pausing productization, rather than development, and is, to a notable extent, led by players who are just late in the market and need some time to catch up.

Decentralized Finance that is too perfect for reality

Blockchains, DeFi, DAO, and Web 3.0 in general, all carry the message of decentralization, and particularly of decentralizing financial systems. Decentralization means, for the most part, eliminating the trusted authorities that are involved in various types of transactions. Those transactions could be agreements (to be facilitated by decentralized smart contracts) and the transfer of funds in general (to be facilitated by Bitcoins and alike). Centralization of financial services is considered evil, because the middlemen often have their own incentives, and even when they don’t, they often charge a lot for their essential role in the system. As we move into the decentralized era, we have smart contracts, which enforce themselves using machine code, without a trusted executor, and Bitcoins, which carry value and can be transferred between people without them having to trust any specific or state-owned service provider. Nice.

This post is neither for nor against decentralization. As I see it, nothing can be said against what is essentially an option. A decentralized system is considered as such because it does not require a centralized authority, not because it does not allow one to exist. If you find that you really miss a middleman, then you can always appoint one. If you want the state bank to manage your Bitcoins, then nothing would prevent that. You get an option, and having options is always good.

This post discusses how suitable the current decentralized financial systems are, considering the world they operate in. My take, as the title may disclose, is that while decentralized systems are an excellent idea and a worthy option, their current implementation suffers from shortcomings that we will just have to fix before they can become mainstream. There are many shortcomings, of course, and who am I to even enumerate them, so I will focus on one: the decentralized systems today assume too much perfection; it’s not that they don’t work well — it is that they don’t fail well.

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Patents invented by Machine Learning

A few months ago I read an interesting post, which I felt compelled to write about. The post titled “Australian Court determines that an Artificial Intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of patent law” tells exactly what its title denotes. The case in question comes from the drugs industry, which has always been an avid user of the patent system, but one can easily see how the verdict can be applied to many (if not all) patent areas as well.

The article reads:

“In Australia, a first instance decision by Justice Beach of the Federal Court has provided some guidance: pursuant to Thaler v Commissioner of Patents (2021) FCA 879, an AI system can be the named inventor for an Australian patent application, with a person or corporation listed as the applicant for that patent, or a grantee of the patent.” [...] Worldwide, this is the first court decision determining that an AI system can be an inventor for the purposes of patent law.” [...] “The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), European Patent Office (EPO), and US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) each determined that an inventor must be a natural person.”

An appeal process is still ongoing, but this judgment still serves as an important milestone in the anticipated future of artificial intelligence, which bears enough resemblance to traditional human intelligence to demand similar treatment, first as art, and now also as the subject of patents.

I must admit that when I first read this article it seemed to me as a joke, and even a funny one at that. However, as I kept thinking about it, it made more and more sense. The purpose of this post is to take you through my thought process.

Just note that I am not a lawyer, not a patent attorney, and only express an opinion as someone who’s nowhere close to being authoritative on the subject.

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Machine generated content helping spread fake news

I recently participated in a discussion about the role of machine-generated text in the spread of fake news.

The context of this discussion was the work titled: How Language Models Could Change Disinformation. The progress made by the industry in the area of algorithmic text generation has led to concerns that such systems could be used to generate automated disinformation at scale. This report examines the capabilities of GPT-3 — an AI system that writes text, to analyze its potential use for promoting disinformation (i.e., fake news).

The report reads:

In light of this breakthrough, we consider a simple but important question: can automation generate content for disinformation campaigns? If GPT-3 can write seemingly credible news stories, perhaps it can write compelling fake news stories; if it can draft op-eds, perhaps it can draft misleading tweets.

Following is my take on this.

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On the value of NFT

An NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a data structure that points at a particular data object in a unique way. See it as a way of naming digital objects, such as photos, texts, audio or video, in a way that allows referring to them with no ambiguity.

The ability to refer to data objects allows to “mention” them in transactions. This seemingly trivial ability, when combined with the ability to create immutable records of transactions (as provided by Blockchains), allows us to create immutable records that refer to data objects.

Technically, NFTs do not require blockchains. You could take a photo of a cat, create an NFT for this photo, which is essentially a unique pointer to (or: a descriptor of) it, and then go on to write a real contract on paper that says “this photo of a cat, bearing this unique ID, is hereby assigned to John Smith”, whatever this assignment means.

Blockchains and smart contract technologies allow for such digital agreements to be stored in a public immutable record that does not allow anyone to change it once it was written. The combination of NFTs and blockchain-based smart contracts thus allows us to securely record agreements that declare ownership of digital goods. If you have any file (photo, text, video, etc.), you can create an attestation that tells the entire world that you assign this file to be owned by whoever. What does this “ownership” mean? – Good question; but whatever it means, billions of dollars have already been paid towards such ownerships. Is this real? The money surely is, but is also the value?

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Machine Learning Security: a new crop of technologies

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) specifically, are now at the stage in which we start caring about their security implications. Why now? Because that’s the point at which we usually start caring about the security considerations of new technologies we’ve started using. Looking at previous cases, such as of desktop computing, the Internet, car networks, and IoT (Internet of Things), those technologies first gained fast momentum by the urge to capitalize on their novel use-cases. They were deployed as fast as they could possibly be, by stakeholders rushing to secure their share of the emerging revenue pie. Once the systems started operating en masse, it was finally time to realize that where there is value – there is also malice, and every technology that processes an asset (valuable data that can be traded, the ability to display content to a user and grab her attention, potential for extortion money, etc.) will inevitably lure threat actors who demonstrate impressive creativity when attempting to divert or exploit those assets.

This flow of events is barely surprising, and we were not really shocked to learn that the Internet does not provide much security out of the box, that cars could be hacked remotely through their wireless interfaces, or that cheap home automation gear doesn’t bother to encrypt its traffic. This is economy, and unless there is an immediate public safety issue causing the regulator to intervene (often later than it should), we act upon security considerations only once the new technology is deployed, and the security risks are manifested in a way that they can no longer be ignored.

It happened with desktop computing in the 80’s, with the Internet in the 90’s, with car networks about a decade ago, and with mass IoT about half a decade ago. (In those approximate dates I am not referring to when the first security advocate indicated that there are threats, this usually happened right away if not before, but to when enough security awareness was built for the industry to commit resources towards mitigating some of those threats.) Finally, it’s now the turn of Machine Learning.

When we decide that a new technology “needs security” we look at the threats and see how we can address them. At this point, we usually divide into two camps:

  • Some players, such as those heavily invested in securing the new technology, and consultants keen on capitalizing on the new class of fear that the industry just brought on itself, assert that “this is something different”; everything we knew about security has to be re-learned, and all tools and methodologies that we’ve built no longer suffice. In short, the sky is falling and we’re for the rescue.

  • Older security folks will point at the similarities, concluding that it’s the same security, just with different assets, requirements, and constraints that need to be accounted for. IoT Security is the same security just with resource constrained devices, physical assets, long device lifetime, and harsh network conditions; car security is the same security with a different type of network, different latency requirements, and devastating kinetic effects in case of failure, and so forth.

I usually associate with the second camp. Each new area of security introduces a lot of engineering work, but the basic paradigms remain intact. It’s all about securing computer systems, just with different properties. Those different properties make tremendous differences, and call for different specializations, but the principles of security governance, and even the nature of the high-level objectives, are largely reusable.

With Machine Learning the situation is different. This is a new flavor of security that calls for a new crop of technologies and startups that deploy a different mindset towards solving a new set of security challenges; including challenges that are not at focus in other domains. The remainder of this post will delve into why ML Security is different (unlike the previous examples), and what our next steps could look like when investing in mitigation technologies.

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Your Bitcoin wallet will never be your bank account

Don’t get me wrong; Bitcoin and crypto currencies are a big deal, at least technology-wise. Bitcoin and blockchains taught us a lot on what can be done with security protocols, and at a lower level, it even taught us that computation inefficiency is not always a bad word, but something that can yield benefits, if that inefficiency is properly orchestrated and exploited. It was also the most prevalent demonstration of scarcity being artificially created by technology alone. As I wrote before, blockchains will probably have some novel use-cases one day, and Bitcoin, aside of being a mechanism for transferring money, also provides a target of speculation, which in itself can be (and is) monetized.

What I truly do not understand are the advocates who see Bitcoin wallets as the near-future replacement for bank accounts, and Bitcoin replacing banks (and other financial institutions) in the near future. I understand the motivation, as those are dreams easy to fall for, but for crypto-currency wallets to replace financial institutions much more is needed, and for the sake of this discussion I will not even delve into the many technical difficulties.

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An obvious limitation of machine-learning for security

I recently came across this study titled “Unknown Threats are The Achilles Heel of Email Security”. It concludes that traditional e-mail scanning tools, that also utilize machine-learning to cope with emerging threats, are still not reacting fast enough to new threats. This is probably true, but I think this conclusion should be considered even more widely, beyond e-mail.

Threats are dynamic. Threat actors are creative and well-motivated enough to make threat mitigation an endlessly moving target. So aren’t we fortunate to have this new term, “machine learning”, recently join our tech jargon? Just like many other buzzwords, the term is newer than what it denotes, but nonetheless, a machine that learns the job autonomously seems to be precisely what we need for mitigating ever-changing threats.

All in all, machine-learning is good for security, but yet in some cases it is a less significant addition to our defense arsenal. Why? – Because while you learn, you often don’t do the job well enough; and a machine is no different. Eventually, the merits of learning-while-doing are to be determined by the price of the resulting temporary imperfectness.

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Blockchains: useful or not?

One of the biggest technological controversies of the decade are blockchains. There is no debate on how brilliant the technology is. It is very clever, if not genius. The only debate is on how useful it really is. Crypto currencies like Bitcoin are a strong use-case for blockchains, but how many other real use-cases are there? Some people claim that blockchains will change the Internet for good, while others consider it as a clever solution still seeking a problem. Reality is probably somewhere in between, as it usually is.

Blockchains often appear to be more useful than they really are, because their proponents bring up uses for blockchains which could also be facilitated using other, simpler and traditional techniques. Most of those uses, which could also be attained without blockchains, are indeed better off without them. As clever as blockchains are, they always add complexity where they are deployed. In other words, I have not yet seen a single problem that could be solved by either blockchains or other technical means, and where the blockchain-based approach was the simpler one. It follows that if we want to discuss the true merits of blockchains, then we shall identify those problems that could be solved using blockchains, and which could not be solved by simpler existing technologies.

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Bitcoin does not provide anonymity

When people discuss Bitcoin, one of its properties that is often considered is its presumable anonymity. In this respect, it is often compared to cash. However, it shall be recognized and understood that Bitcoin is not as anonymous as cash; far from it, actually. Its anonymity relies on the concept of pseudonyms, which delivers some (unjustified) sense of anonymity, but very weak anonymity in practice.

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