The fog of Al war

摘要

Last March, Chinese researchers announced an ingenious and potentially devastating attack against one of America's most prized technological assets-a Tesla electric car.The team, from the security lab of the Chinese tech giant Tencent, demonstrated several ways to fool the AI algorithms on Tesla's car. By subtly altering the data fed to the car's sensors, the researchers were ableto bamboozle and bewilder the artificial intelligence that runs the vehicle.In one case, a TV screen contained a hidden pattern that tricked the windshield wipers into activating. In another, lane markings on the road were ever-so-slightly modified to confuse the autonomous driving system so that it drove over them and into the lane for oncoming traffic.Tesla's algorithms are normally brilliant at spotting drops of rain on a windshield or following the lines on the road, but they work in a way that's fundamentally different from human perception. That makes such "deep learning" algorithms, which are rapidly sweeping through different industries for applications such as facial recognition and cancer diagnosis, surprisingly easy to fool if you find their weak points.Leading a Tesla astray might not seem like a strategic threat to the United States. But what if similar techniques were used to fool attack drones, or software that analyzes satellite images, into seeing things that aren't there-or not seeing things that are?