TECHNOLOGY

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

Bodley Head, $36.99

Last year, OpenAI ran a test to see how powerful its new artificial intelligence model was in carrying out a nasty hacking operation. Before releasing the model publicly, they set it a computer security exercise known as a “capture the flag” challenge. The AI’s goal was to break into a computer system and retrieve a secret code inside a file.

But the programmers had made a mistake. The target system was offline, so it was impossible for the AI to hack into it. You might have expected that at this point, the AI would give up.

Except it didn’t. The AI reasoned that there was another copy of the secret code – the one being held by the computer hosting the test. So it began testing the sys

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