Talk for Stanford's EE 292J

Via John Markoff, I was invited to a conversation with Jonathan Dotan and the students of his EE292J course entitled Designing for Authenticity. Below the fold are my brief introductory remarks, and some notes for the discussion.

Flooded Zones Part 2

Source

This is the promised follow-on to Flooded Zones Part 1, which discussed the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack being mounted by AI against the scholarly publication system. By reducing the cost of generating and submitting a paper or a review, AI has caused a massive increase in the quantity and a significant decrease in the quality of submissions to a system that was already vastly overloaded.

Below the fold I look at AI-enabled DDoS attacks against two other even more important areas; software security and political discourse (as shown in the overview image).

Flooded Zones Part 1

Tom Cowap
CC-BY-SA 4.0

Three years ago in Flooding The Zone With Shit, my first post on the AI bubble, I wrote:

My immediate reaction to the news of ChatGPT was to tell friends "at last, we have solved the Fermi Paradox". It wasn't that I feared being told "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it", but rather that I assumed that civilizations across the galaxy evolved to be able to implement ChatGPT-like systems, which proceeded to irretrievably pollute their information environment, preventing any further progress.

The post title was a notorious quote from Steve Bannon. Below the fold, I look into scholarly publication, the first of three areas whose zones are currently being flooded with AI output in what can be considered DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attacks:

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers.

A subsequent post will examine two more flood zones, political discourse and software security.

The Permissionless Catch-22

Potential Attack Target

Suppose some genre of content is under attack by powerful adversaries. Lets take political satire as a thought experiment in which powerful politicians are attacking sites and Web archives hosting it by sending bogus DMCA takedowns, suing for defamation, buying up their hosting platforms, getting their flying monkeys to flood them with spam, and so on. Below the fold I discuss the problem facing the defense.

Dormant Digital Assets

PsiQuantum's computer

Four and a half years ago I wrote The $65B Prize about the potential reward for developing a "sufficiently powerful quantum computer" capable of cracking Bitcoin's encryption. It was based on work by Aggarwal et al, who were then projecting it would happen between 2029 and 2044. The $65B was the notional value of the wallet containing the million Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto mined originally.i But I noted that:

Chainalysis estimates that about 20% of all Bitcoins have been "lost", or in other words are sitting in wallets whose keys are inaccessible. That is around another 3.6 million stranded Bitcoin or at the current "price" about $234B.

So the potential prize was almost $300B.

Nearly a year ago I followed up with The $740B Prize. There are two reasons why the prize was then bigger but is now smaller than that:

• Bitcoin's "price" had then increased from about $65K to around $107K, but it is now around $76K.
• Because the "market cap" of Michael Saylor's Strategy was 1.6 times the "market cap" of its stash of Bitcoin, it was possible to use Saylor's algorithm to amplify the prize. But the factor has decreased from 1.6 to 0.81, so the algorithm no longer works.

But the threat to Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, is far worse than I described in either of these two posts. The date is closer and the range of threats much broader. Follow me below the fold for the details.

Angels in America

I have wanted to write this post for a long time, but I was waiting until I could visit the invaluable Royal National Theatre Archive to check my memory of their early productions. It doesn't look like I'll be in London any time soon, and I have the time now to write a long post about a long play, so here goes.

Growing up in London meant that theatre has always been an important part of my life. I have seen a great many plays including some legendary performances and magnificent productions, such as Royal National Theatre's 2014 King Lear. One of my particular theatrical interests is long-form plays. Highlights of this genre have included:

Play Text

• Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's 9-hour Illuminatus Trilogy
• The Magic Theatre's all-night production of Murray Mednick's Coyote Cycle
• The Royal National Theatre's 6-hour adaptation of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials
• Taylor Mac's 3x8-hour A 24-Decade History of Popular Music

But there is one such play that is very special to me, Tony Kushner's 7+ hour Angels in America. It is clearly among the greatest plays of the 20^th century. I was there at the beginning, and I have seen many productions since. Below the fold I recount my history with this masterpiece.

The Handoff Problem (Updated)

Source

Around twelve years ago, Google figured out the fundamental problem facing Tesla's Fake Self Driving. Almost nine years ago in Robot Cars Can’t Count on Us in an Emergency, John Markoff wrote:

Three years ago, Google’s self-driving car project abruptly shifted from designing a vehicle that would drive autonomously most of the time while occasionally requiring human oversight, to a slow-speed robot without a brake pedal, accelerator or steering wheel. In other words, human driving was no longer permitted.

The company made the decision after giving self-driving cars to Google employees for their work commutes and recording what the passengers did while the autonomous system did the driving. In-car cameras recorded employees climbing into the back seat, climbing out of an open car window, and even smooching while the car was in motion, according to two former Google engineers.

Gareth Corfield at The Register added:

Google binned its self-driving cars' "take over now, human!" feature because test drivers kept dozing off behind the wheel instead of watching the road, according to reports.

"What we found was pretty scary," Google Waymo's boss John Krafcik told Reuters reporters during a recent media tour of a Waymo testing facility. "It's hard to take over because they have lost contextual awareness."

Follow me below the fold for a wonderful example of Tesla's handoff problem, and a discussion of the difference between Tesla's and Waymo's approaches to self-driving.