A Little Caution Required?

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How far down the rabbit hole can we get before we wake up to the fact that bean counters, bottom-liners and shareholder-value maximisers are weaponising tech in search of profit? Agentic AI is now being touted as a business model applying to every level of human activity, with few questions asked or checks and balances applied to its deployment. Software is software: created and implemented by humans, themselves inherently flawed. Software systems work until they crash, and very few don't crash at some point in their existence. The difference with AI is that it is self-replicating and self-healing by design: if it breaks, it can fix itself.

With an LLM [Large Language Model] in isolation, this is part of its design brief, and perfectly OK, but when agency is brought to the table, multiple LLMs can collaborate and develop. The problem is that the humans who are the funders and developers of these systems neither understand nor care about their abilities to expand their sphere of influence and impinge on the human world in unpredictable ways: if profit is the central motive [as it usually is], negative consequences are always way down the list of considerations in any sphere of life: AI being no exception.

I'm not a fundamentalist AI naysayer or Techno-Luddite by any means, but the question of 'bad action' by a complex of AI systems networked and working in tandem, badly programmed by flawed human beings is nevertheless a tad scary. If humans can hack, so can AI. The potential for some manner of disaster is already manifest in our failed 'customer service' systems, to take the most trivial as an example. How long before this model of machine control is actually uncontrollable by us, its creators. We are acutely aware that the first great resilient network - the Internet - can't be switched off or reset: it was designed to be so; so where are the tethers that hold back the [semi] intelligent agents that we are unleashing on the world at an astonishingly high rate? It's a thought that bears some consideration in my [ageing and analogue] book...

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