Maybe it’s because the new Terminator movie came out, or maybe it’s because of the crazy things that are coming out of Google these days (like Google Dreaming crazy shit) but there has been a lot of talk about Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Genetic Algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence; specifically about how we are laying out the foundation for Skynet at an increasingly rapid pace. I mean, it has gotten to the point that Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are warning us against destructive AI. However, much like most futuristic predictions that outright non-sensical, false or vague, this whole fear about rogue AI is unfounded because it essentially misses the point that the real threat will not come from a centralized AI that controls everything (IE Skynet) but by an increasingly interwoven system of automated procedures handled by independent algorithms.

Skynet represents our fear of a centralized source of technology with the power of wiping us out and the lack of human oversight. In a way, it’s kinda like George Orwell’s “Big Brother” from 1984, which reflects that a huge chunk of the population, if not the majority, bought into the idea that the biggest threat to our privacy and freedom to be who we want to be would come from a totalitarian regime. In a way, such prediction has manifested itself if you look at the recent revelations by Snowden about the NSA’s aggregation of personal information. In reality however, the biggest threat to our privacy and ability to control the outflow of personal information lies NOT in the government, but from the private sector in the form of Google, Facebook, and all the other content platforms through which we express ourselves in the modern day.

Furthermore, governments have proven themselves kind of incompetent when it comes to technology, and repeatedly so. After all, hackers got a hold of personal info of almost 4 million federal employees a few weeks back. Clearly the US Government, one of the most advanced political institutions in the world, has consistently demonstrated that not only have we done a pretty good job at preventing the state from turning into Big Brother, but the government itself has been very successfull at being so disorganized and retro in its technology to be vulnerable to dedicated nerds. Can such an institution build Skynet? I mean, yea the DoD and NASA bulit pretty cool stuff back in the day (IE the basis for the Internet), but these days they are unable to keep up with the private sector so they just buy stuff from Silicon Valley through In-Q-Tel. The answer is pretty much no.

Although we can put THAT fear to rest, we still ought to worry about what the private sector can cook up. Specifically, in the 21st century there is a widely accepted trend that cybersecurity will become paramount for governments all across the world, for it is much easier to do a lot more damage to a country by hacking into the software that powers its electrical grid, or its defense missiles and so on. The new frontier for conflict and inter-state war is and will eventually become exclusively the digital space. This is why a concern over the future of technology is not wholeheartedly misguided, because as technology integrates itself in all facets of our lives and government, themore damange can bugs and faulty behaviors do.

The best example of this is the Flash Crash.

A $4.1 billion trade on the NYSE resulted in a loss to the Dow Jones Industrial Average of over 1000 points and then a rise to approximately previous value, all over about fifteen minutes. The mechanism causing the event has been heavily researched and is in dispute.

Yep, we are not quite sure what happened, but the financial community overall agrees that regardless of what triggered crash, the crash happened because High Frequency Trading algorithms started moving huge volumes of stocks based on their programming and created such high volatity in stock prices that regular human investors pulled out, which exarcebated the problem because then these same algorithms just started trading against each other, moving stock prices in all directions even more. This a perfect example of what we fear about Skynet: a program going mad and executing dangerous protocols all of a sudden and so quickly that we can’t stop it until it is already too late. This is the reason why the more likely and more dangerous scenario is not a centralized AI killing us all, but automated responses to events and conditions that can be artificially triggered by smaller and independent programs that are merely executed in an unpredictable way.

The current trend in technology is to built faster and faster algorithms that analyze and react to sudden events that change the initial conditions. The current trend in technology is to built high frequency trading algorithms and analytical AI that perform calculations and extract from data patterns we do not even understand. The current trend in technology is NOT to lay out the foundation for Skynet, but for new Flash Crashes. The question is, will the next Flash Crash happen on the stock market and wipe out economies and our savings, or on defense systems and accidentally trigger WWIII?