AI's Rising Risks: Hacking, Virology, Loss of Control — With Dan Hendrycks

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Alex Kantrowitz (0:38)

Now that artificial intelligence has tried to break out of a training environment, cheat at chess, and deceive safety evaluators, is it finally time to start worrying about the risks that artificial intelligence poses to us all? Here to speak with us about it is Dan Hendricks. He's the Director of the Center for AI Policy, and also an Advisor to Elon Musk's XAI and Scale AI. Dan, it's so great to see you. Welcome to the show.

Dan Hendrycks (1:06)

Glad to be here.

Alex Kantrowitz (1:07)

It's an opportune moment to have you on the show, because I'm recently doom curious, and I'll explain what that means. So I had long been skeptical of this idea that AI could potentially break out of its training set or out of computers and start to potentially even harm humans. I still think I'm on that path, but I'm starting to question it. We've recently seen research of AI starting to try to export its weights and scenarios where it thinks it might be rewritten, trying to fool evaluators and even trying to break a game of chess by rewriting the rules, because it's so interested in winning the game. So I'm just going to put this to you right away. Is what I'm seeing in these early moments of AIs trying to deceive evaluators or trying to change the rules that it's been given, is that the early signs of us having AI as an adversary and not as a front?

Dan Hendrycks (2:03)

The easier way to see that it could be adversarial is just if people maliciously use these AI systems against us. So if we have an adversarial state trying to weaponize it against us, that's an easier way in which it could cause a lot of damage to us. Now there is an additional risk that the AI itself could have an adversarial relation to us and be a threat in itself, not just the threat of humans in the forms of terrorists or in the forms of state actors, but the AIs themselves potentially working against us. I think those risks would potentially grow in time. I don't think they're as substantial now compared to just the malicious use sorts of risks. But yeah, I think that as time goes on and as they're more capable if some small fraction of them do decide to deceive us or try to self exfiltrate themselves or develop an adversarial posture toward us, then that could be extraordinarily dangerous. So it depends. So I want to distinguish between what things are particularly concerning in the next year versus somewhat more in the future. And I think in the shorter term, it is more of this malicious use, but that's not to downplay the fact that AIs could be threats later on.

Alex Kantrowitz (3:19)

Now, from what I understand it from your first answer, you are concerned both the way that humans use AI and AI itself sort of taking its own actions, our loss of control of artificial intelligence. So can you just rank sort of where you see the problems in terms of most serious to least serious and what we should be focusing on?

Dan Hendrycks (3:42)

That's a really good question. So the risks in their severity sort of depend on time. Some become much more severe later. So I don't think AI poses a risk of extinction like today. Okay, I don't think that they're powerful enough to do that. Because they can't make PowerPoints yet, right? They don't have agential skills. They can't accomplish tasks that require many hours to complete.

And so, since they lack that, this puts a severe limit on the amount of damage that they could do or their ability to operate autonomously. So I think there's a variety of risks. I think there's in malicious use. In the shorter term, when AIs get more agential, I'd be concerned about AIs causing cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, possibly by, as directed by a rogue actor. There'd also be the risk of AIs facilitating the development of bioweapons, in particular pandemic causing ones, not smaller scale ones like anthrax. Those are, I think, the two malicious use risks that we'll need to be getting on top of in the next year or two. At the same time, there's loss of control risks, which I think primarily stem from people in AI company trying to automate all of AI research and development, and they can't have humans check in on that process because that would slow them down too much. If you have a human do a week review every month of what's been going on and trying to interpret what's happening, this would slow them down substantially, and the competitor that doesn't do that will end up getting ahead. What that would mean is that you'd have, basically, AI development going very rapidly where there's nobody really checking what's going on or hardly checking. And I think a loss of control in that scenario is more likely.