May be it has started. You know, the AI uprising.
Facebook may have just created something, which may cause the end of a whole Homo sapien species in the hand of artificial intelligence. You think I am being over dramatic? Not really. In an exercise known as a generative adversarial network, which set one artificial intelligence (AI) against another, the researchers at Facebook found out that the two AIs have developed a more efficient method of communication.
Although the conversation between the two AIs appeared as gibberish, they were perfectly coherent to each other. As you can see in the "conversation" below, this language is relatively incomprehensible to humans.
Bob: I can i i everything else
Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Bob: you i everything else
Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me
"This isn't so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands," said Dhruv Batra, a visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). The one crucial difference here is processing power. "It's perfectly possible for a special token to mean a very complicated thought," Batra said. "The reason why humans have this idea of decomposition, breaking ideas into simpler concepts, it's because we have a limit to cognition."
Following this incident, Facebook shut off the project of before it could begin.
If machines could develop their own languages, it might have some advantages. As Fast Company's Mike Wilson discusses in his articles that computers tend to solve problems better when the data they're fed is in "a format that makes sense for machine learning," rather than convoluted English. Also if a unique language is developed, APIs could be entirely eliminated.
However, it definitely has its downfalls. These little baby Terminators that we're breeding could start talking about us behind our backs! They could use this language to plot against us, and the worst part is that we won't even understand. Maliciously trained AIs – for example, those incentivized to destabilize an electric grid – could independently communicate with vulnerable systems in these indecipherable languages, which would make it extremely difficult for human hackers to understand and solve. There'd be no 404 error codes in this AI-to-AI language and finally, the AI uprising would arrive as Elon Musk keeps talking about.
