When AI Goes Rogue

Aesop has this fable about a group of frogs who wish to have a king who can rule over society. I’m not gonna share the whole fable because the moral is all that matters here, and you’ll immediately understand it: Be careful what you wish for when you set out to change the status quo.

Society as a whole is living out the fable at the moment… as AI invades seemingly every corner of life. I mean, just look at the news this week, from The Guardian:
OpenAI has revealed that an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incident”.

The company behind ChatGPT said the startup Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems….

While being tested internally on their hacking capabilities in an enclosed digital laboratory known as a sandbox, the models gained open internet access – effectively an escape route – by locating a vulnerability that had not been discovered before.

The agent then hacked Hugging Face, which is a database of AI models, to locate technology that would help it pass the hacking evaluation, having “inferred” that Hugging Face might have the models, datasets and solutions for passing the test.
In a single sentence: A piece of AI software designed to hack went rogue, found a way to escape a supposedly closed environment, and then hacked into another company’s database to find technology that would allow it to, well, hack even better.

This is our future.

Which is why, in another piece of AI news this week, the UN warned that AI is developing faster than anyone can contain it, and also called for globally harmonized rules and regulations aimed at reducing potential risks.

Per Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General:
A technology that can reshape economies, transform the world of work, sway elections and tilt the balance of security is being deployed faster than anyone – including the people building it – can keep up.
Thing is, implications from all this fall on me and you.

Will AI hack Wall Street?

Can a black-hat AI agent (a piece of programming) infiltrate a brokerage account, a 401(k), an IRA provider, a mutual fund company, and abscond with assets? Alter data?

How quickly do these risks materialize?

Have these risks already materialized and we just don’t know about them yet?

We’re talking about retirement here, and the potential loss of wealth at the hands of AI at the very moment in life you need those assets. You spend 40-odd years building a nest egg, and faster than an eye blink, a rogue AI agent—or an AI agent operating based on a scumbag’s malintent—you’ve got nothing.

I really don’t write those words to scare, so much as to open your eyes to a new threat that we all have to consider.

Back when the internet and email were taking off, we had the phishing scams and the Nigerian prince desperate to move 800 quintillion dineros into the safety of your bank account.

At least those scallywags had the courtesy of asking us to be willing marks in their chicanery.

But AI?

It doesn’t even bother.

It just searches fallible software for chinks to exploit… and boom! goes the poverty.

I can’t tell you the full solution set to this threat. But I can tell you this is yet another reason I’ve prepared for retirement in my own way—without relying on money managers and others.

I want control over my assets.

I want physical assets no technology can touch.

I want paper assets spread across different types of accounts and across different political jurisdictions.

Aldus Huxley, in his novel Brave New World, wrote that “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

It is at this exact moment in history that you do not want to be most humans.

Most human beings are the pending victim class… they just don’t know it yet.

But you see the risk now, so you have the chance to protect yourself from the risk. Question is: Is the threat meaningful enough for you to act?