Mimicking malware to fake people
Published 28 July, 2009, 17:19
Future smartphone viruses designed for identity theft will be will be able to learn and impersonate the phone owner, a panel of experts on artificial intelligence believes.
Soon criminals may use new generation of mobile phone viruses. They would monitor all communication of the owner – emails, text messages, to-do lists and so on. Eventually the malware will have accumulated enough data to impersonate the victim, with or even without external guidance from its authors. It could not only get access to banking information, but also get the person involved in crime without him even knowing it.
This disturbing scenario was among many considered by a group of 25 AI scientists, robot designers, and ethical and legal experts who have gathered to discuss possible risks of expected rapid development in artificial intelligence, as New Scientist magazine reports.
The panel, which was working under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), identified mimicking viruses as a realistic short-term risk. Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania said: “If we could do it, they could,” referring to cybercriminals.
"There are a few thousand lines of code running on my cell phone and I sure as hell haven't verified all of them," agreed Peter Szolovits, an AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not on the panel.
Thankfully the scientists see more apocalyptic “rise of the machines” scenarios as far less possible. Human-like artificial intelligence is still 20 to 100 years away according to their estimates. And the probability of the internet suddenly gaining self-awareness is negligible.
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