In the following we examine the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our everyday lives, as it becomes ubiquitous to our society, from the perspective of security and failure. What happens when the glammed up marketing claims of AI companies encounter the true colors of reality of how AI systems really work, what the outcomes really will be? This is an inquiry into how engineering can go catastrophically wrong in pursuit of profits, but not just in economic terms but in even graver terms to the extreme of even driving all of humanity into a collective insanity of what is known as epistemic instability, when beliefs become uncoupled from true interpretations and become mere fantasies pushed into truth by pure peer pressure of machines operating at a speed and scale no human institutions can keep up with to dispel the falsehoods, the age of autonomous influence operations. Then understand that those falsehoods are not someone’s desire to control or rule the world, but can be simply emergent out of the technology itself, rather than human driven desires for property, power and prestige, for conspiracy theorists: that perhaps the deep state is nothing more then an emergent process of technology, an emergent AI. On the one hand we have ways to undermine our existence through planned means and on the other hand we have ways to destroy ourselves through emergent means of the technology itself, that catastrophe is endogenous to the systems we have created to avert catastrophe, a systems design issue, not an issue of malice, greed, or conquest. Yet, it is also a story about cyber criminal gangs and the greater existential threat they pose through this new magnitude of AI technology and what it can do, from social engineering for phishing to trading manipulation, not to mention the occasional job for authoritarian regimes.
