Weaponized AI. Merely Paranoia?

Last Saturday, I needed some happy music as I was trying to do things around the house, and I ended up with a bunch of German pop songs. One of the songs on that list was a song called “Dusche” (“Shower”, as in “bathroom shower”) by Farin Urlaub, who is very successful both as a solo artist and as a member of the group Die Ärzte.

Mind you, the video may not be for everybody, but I include it here because the video makes it pretty clear what’s being sung about and the translation is pretty decent. The whole story of the song is that this man finds himself fighting against his household items, as they have started a revolt and seem to be planning to assassinate him. He, in turn, becomes more unhinged as he fights against him. The place where the shower comes in is in the chorus, where he sings “And I’m sleeping in the shower, ’cause the shower sticks with me, it’s the only friend I have left in the entire world” and describes it as the only thing he can trust because it’s remained normal.

Although it’s a hard rock track, and the video is even a *little* gruesome at the end of the video (kind of depends on one’s definition), I find the song hilarious. The premise is so ludicrous in the first place, and the overreaction of the protagonist is crazy. One assumes that the man singing is paranoid, but there’s just enough of the thread of reality holding him in that he can get words like “Haushaltsgegenstände” (household items) into the song.

(The song even has an English Wikipedia article, which can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusche)

The thing is, when I was listening to it on Saturday, a truly disturbing thought came to mind. The song came out in 2005, which was when I was still living in Germany. Yes, at that time, there were good computers, there were iPods, there were even cell phones – though my Siemens M35 had a text memory of 10 messages!

Not to sound paranoid myself, because I do enjoy a lot of technology, but what we’re seeing in Artificial Intelligence these days actually makes the scenario of what happens in “Dusche” a lot more possible. I can’t imagine wanting “smart” items in my house already; for whatever advantages that they are supposed to give us, the disadvantages when they don’t work correctly seem to be more catastrophic than when normal things stop working… Maybe it’s just me.

Sure, the idea of technology turned against us has been around for a long, long time, it’s a common theme even in early science fiction. However, the idea that one’s toaster could be used to attack somebody through artificial intelligence is the stuff nightmares are made of. Somehow, though, the more people bring this stuff into their homes, the more these crazy things are likely to come true at some scale. “Lockdown” or “house arrest” could come to have new meaning. Again, I don’t mean to be paranoid, but already cars come with their information and entertainment packages, and where and how that is all being used is being transmitted to others. As a passive thing, most people are probably fine with it – the people who objected back in the day were few – but it doesn’t take all that much imagination that there would be methods to weaponize that at some point, at least in theory.

Seriously, I don’t think that weaponized AI is going to look like the video of “Dusche”. However, I think it is reasonable to be wary of going all-in with the “smart” homes and adoption of AI just for the sake of its adoption.

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