"Perhaps Even More Dangerous than Nuclear Bombs": Tech Expert Toby Walsh on Artificial Intelligence – DER SPIEGEL International Edition

DER SPIEGEL: Would it even still be realistic at all to outlaw AI-controlled weapons, for instance through a counterpart to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as you suggest in your new book "Machines Behaving Badly?"

Walsh: Well, outlawing them may not always work perfectly, but it can prevent worse. There are quite a few examples of weapons that were initially used but were later outlawed. Think of the widespread use of poison gas in World War I. Or think of blinding lasers, which can blind soldiers. They were outlawed by a United Nations protocol in 1998 and have almost never appeared on battlefields since, even though civilian laser technology is, as we know, widely used. For anti-personnel mines, the ban doesn't work as well, but at least 40 million of them have been destroyed due to outlawing protocols, saving the lives of many children. It's a similar story with cluster munitions: About 99 percent of the stockpile has been destroyed, even though they were used again in Syria. We can ensure that autonomous weapons become unacceptable by stigmatizing them.

DER SPIEGEL: Just four years ago, you predicted a glorious future for AI in your bestseller "It's Alive." What led to your change of heart?

Walsh: Reality happened! We've just seen a lot of unpleasant side effects of AI. Gradually, it became clearer and clearer the extent to which targeted election advertising was being used to sort of hack people's brains into voting for Donald Trump or Brexit, which often goes against their own interests. And through self-learning programs, these attacks have swelled into a perfect storm.

DER SPIEGEL: Does it give you hope that the European Union is currently working on a directive on "Trusted AI"?

Walsh: The EU is really leading the way when it comes to regulating AI. And the European market is big enough that it's worthwhile for global corporations to adapt their AI products to European rules. However, the devil is in the details. Formulating rules is one thing, but the question is how vigorously compliance with the rules will then actually be enforced.

DER SPIEGEL: There are already considerable differences of opinion in the premlinary stages, for example on the question of transparency. Can AI really be transparent and comprehensible or isn't it always, by definition, partly a black box?

Walsh: Transparency is overrated. People aren't transparent either yet we often trust them in our everyday lives. I trust my doctor, for example, even though I'm not a medical professional and can't understand her decisions in detail. And even though I have no idea what's going on inside her. But I do trust the institutions that monitor my doctor.

DER SPIEGEL: How can we make sure that an AI is working according to the rules, even though we don't know its code in detail?

Walsh: This is a tricky problem but it's not limited to AI. Modern companies are also a form of superhuman intelligence. Not even the smartest person on the planet could build an iPhone all by themself. No one is smart enough to design a power plant by themself. Every large corporation interconnects the intelligence of tens of thousands of moderately intelligent employees to form a superhumanly smart collective in other words, a kind of artificial intelligence, as it were.

DER SPIEGEL: Couldn't we just pull the plug on an AI system that misbehaves and that would be the end of it?

Walsh: No way! We can't just turn off the computers of the global banking system, then the global economy would collapse. We can't turn off the computers of air traffic control either, then traffic would collapse. We also can't turn off the computers of power plants, because then we would experience a blackout. We are totally dependent on computers, already today. This dependence is only increasing with AI. We can't get rid of it. We can only try to ensure that the values of AI are in harmony with the values of our society.

DER SPIEGEL: You once correctly predicted that a self-driving car would cause a fatal accident with a cyclist and pedestrian, which is exactly what happened one year later. What do you predict for the next five years?

Walsh: With automatic facial recognition, we will see scandals. The American startup Clearview AI has scraped millions of photos without the consent of the people involved. The company was sued for that, but just keeps going. It's incredible they haven't already been sued into bankruptcy. And one more prediction: deep fakes i.e. movies and photos manipulated with the help of AI on the internet will increase. In a few years, deep fakes will decide an election or trigger a war or even both.

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"Perhaps Even More Dangerous than Nuclear Bombs": Tech Expert Toby Walsh on Artificial Intelligence - DER SPIEGEL International Edition