AI will need a massive global investment...
...for cleaning up all the damage it will do.
Think of the amounts of scams criminals will do with video's of people looking and sounding exactly like your demanding boss to wire money, or your son or daughter in peril needing cash to bail out of jail, or elderly people being called "by their kids" over whatsapp with the message that there is a bank run going on and they need to immediately transfer their life savings. Think you're smart enough to protect both yourself and your tech illiterate loved ones? Criminals only need to succeed once, find one weak spot or moment of weakness and trying a thousand times and hundreds of entirely different scams a month will get ever cheaper. Beaten to submission, taken cold when blinking even once.
Think of the ease by which criminals will be able to automate even a half decent AI to try all know simple and less simple ways to hack every single bit of infrastructure, with much of todays infrastructure so poorly protected that it's even proven possible to block the largest vital oil pipelines in the States and so on. Sure, those networks should be far better protected already, but they have some amount of protection by the effort needed to try and find the (very) weak spots. Cheap AI will make short work of "some amount of protection by hiding holes in plain sight". With the plentiful weaknesses and holes found over the entire range from "high end" equipment, lousy programming of said equipment, lacking safety protocols, lack of understanding of safety by the majority of employees... it'll be unrealistic to keep ahead of the flood of hacking and extortion waves coming towards us. There are just too few skilled people if we tried to do so timely and the sense of urgency is still lacking.
On top of that, much infrastructure has some sort of protection by the risk of criminals being detected when trying to spot weaknesses and hack it. Sure, many good hackers can get away with it but not millions of them. At millions renting "hacking and ransomware as a service" involving thousands of AI routines each, law enforcement is basically drowned so much that they won't be able to investigate one in a million of successful hacks. Sure it's a growing trend already, but AI will be rather good at one thing: offer a half decent service at pennies a piece.
As to the climate problem? AI will solve that! After first letting global energy consumption skyrocket. Then maybe...
It'll be like Bitcoin. Profit for a minority, at a cost for many. Unfortunately at a scale that will make us feel nostalgic about the good old days of Bitcoin that wasn't that bad and wasteful...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
