How To Play Tricks On Artificial Intelligence?

While in the last years, sci-fi stories, experts and even some opinion-leader public figures frequently spelled the end of mankind through artificial intelligence, lately, it turned out just how easy it is to play tricks on smart algorithms and fool them into making errors. We looked around how researchers can hack A.I. and what that means for medicine and healthcare, mainly from a security perspective.

Does A.I. have an Achilles heel? As the saying goes, a chain is as strong as its weakest link – and the ancient Greeks knew it. No matter that Achilles had extraordinary strength, courage, and loyalty, that he fought as the bravest in the Trojan war, as a tiny spot on his body was targeted, he was down. Recent examples show that something similar might happen in the back yard of artificial intelligence – if we are not vigilant enough and don’t do the necessary steps to counter it.

While in the latest years, we could hear a lot about the power and capabilities of A.I. – even to bring humanity to its knees, recent news talk about the fact that researchers have found the Achilles heel of smart algorithms. Remember when Stephen Hawking said that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race? Or when Elon Musk told Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance, the author of the biography Elon Musk, that he was afraid that his friend Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and now the C.E.O. of its parent company, Alphabet, could have perfectly good intentions but still “produce something evil by accident”—including, possibly, “a fleet of artificial intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind”? However, it’s not that easy to imagine a Matrix-like universe when carefully painted lines on the road might “capture” self-driving cars leaving them in an irresolvable loop. And that’s what is happening lately.