The chief executive of Tesla and Space X, Elon Musk told his followers on twitter that future of cyber warfare is terrifying as more and more attacks are happening on websites and artificial intelligence is developing enormously.
The warning pertains to a mixture of machine-learning AI and vulnerable systems that lay the foundation of the internet and through which the war may be waged.
“Only a matter of time before advanced AI is used to do this. Internet is particularly susceptible to a gradient descent algo,” read Musk’s tweet on Thursday (November 03).
Musk had raised his concerns earlier also, much before Tesla cars used the technology to partially drive themselves on public roads and learn how to improve their skills. He's characterized super smart robots as possibly more dangerous than nuclear weapons and even donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, an organization whose mission is to make sure that AI helps humans rather than harm them.
Musk tweeted the warning in response to an article by the Economist, which claims that recent attacks on the internet "could be a prelude to far worse ones". The article claimed that the world is facing a growing threat of DDoS attacks.
The article came after the internet boiled over the hack on Dynamic Network Services (Dyn) last month which affected hundreds of websites and online services including Netflix, PayPal, Twitter and many others. The website which monitors traffic for a lot of major websites was taken down on October 21 by a massive distributed denial of service by a group of unknown hackers in the West. Analysis of the incident confirmed that the hackers used a huge "botnet," or a system of computers that comprised simple internet of things (IoT) devices to overload Dyn systems.
Though it’s a guess whether the robots are plotting to take over yet the tech industry needs to be geared up.
