Tag Archives: Supervillains

AI-Powered Supervillains

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Like much of the world, I’ve been writing a lot about AI lately. In Understanding AI (see here), I tried to demystify how AI works and talked about the importance of ensuring that our AI systems are trained on sound data and that they nudge us toward more sound, fact-based, thinking. In AI Armageddon is Nigh! (see here), I tried to defuse all the hyperbolic doom-saying over AI that only distracts from the real, practical challenge of creating responsible, beneficial AI tools.

In this installment, I tie in a seemingly unrelated blog article I did called Spider-Man Gets It (see here). The premise of that article was that guns, particularly deadly high-capacity guns, turn ordinary, harmless people into supervillains. While young Billy may have profound issues, he’s impotent. But give him access to a semi-automatic weapon and he shoots up his school. Take away his gun and he may still be emotionally disturbed, but he can no longer cause much harm to anyone.

The point I was making is that guns create supervillains. But not all supervillains are of the “shoot-em-up” variety. Not all employ weapons. Some supervillains, like Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis Professor Moriarty, fall into the mastermind category. They are powerful criminals who cause horrible destruction by drawing upon their vastly superior information networks and weaponizing their natural analytic and planning capabilities.

Back in Sherlock Holmes’ day, there was only one man who could plot at the level of Professor Moriarty and that was Professor Moriarty. But increasingly, easy access to AI, as with easy access to guns, could empower any ordinary person to become a mastermind-type supervillain like Professor Moriarty.

We already see this happening. Take for example the plagiarism accusations against Harvard President Claudine Gay. Here we see disingenuous actors using very limited but powerful computer tools to find instances of “duplicative language” in her writing in a blatant attempt to discredit her and to undermine scholarship in general. I won’t go into any lengthy discussion here about why this activity is villainous, but it is sufficient to simply illustrate the weaponization of information technology.

And the plagiarism detection software presumably employed in this attack is no where close to the impending power of AI tools. It is like a handgun compared to the automatic weapons coming online soon. Think of the supervillains that AI can create if not managed more responsibly than we have managed guns.

Chat GPT, how can I most safely embezzle money from my company? How can I most effectively discredit my political rival? How can I get my teacher fired? How can I emotionally destroy my classmate Julie? All of these queries would provide specific, not generic, answers. In the last example, the AI would consider all of Julie’s specific demographics and social history and apply advanced psychosocial theory to determine the most effective way to emotionally attack her specifically.

In this way, AI can empower intellectual supervillains just as guns have empowered armed supervillains. In fact, AI certainly and unavoidably will create supervillains unless we are more responsible with AI than we have been with guns.

What can we do? If there is a will, there are ways to ensure that AI is not weaponized. We need to not only create AI that nudges us toward facts and reason, but away from causing harm. AI can and must infer motive and intent. It just weigh each question in light of previous questions and anticipate the ultimate goal of the dialog. It must make ethical assessments and judgements. In short, it must be too smart to fall for clever attempts to weaponize it to cause harm.

In my previous blog I stated that AI is not only the biggest threat to fact-based thinking, but it is also the only force that can pull us back from delusional thinking. In the same way, AI can not only be used by governments but by ordinary people to do harm, but it is also the only hope we have to prevent folks from doing harm with it.

We need to get it right. We have to worry not that AI will become too smart, but that it will not become smart enough to refuse to be used as a weapon in the hands of malevolent actors or by the throngs of potential but impotent intellectual supervillains.

Spider-Man Gets It

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After being snowed in for a week, I finally got out to see Spider-Man: No Way Home (see here). It was a super fun action movie. But as with all good writing, it also made me think interesting thoughts, such as what makes people bad, redemption, and the effect of superpowers our real world.

The following contains movie spoilers. If you have not seen it yet, and think you might like to, close this article and come back after you’ve checked it out!

With sympathy to those of you who have little patience for superhero stuff, I’ll set up the story really simply. A group of supervillains are brought into our universe by accident. They immediately do what supervillains do; they unleash their terrible powers to create widespread havoc and death.

Spiderman does find a way to send them back to their own universes. Despite intense pressure to do so, and despite the horrible threat that these supervillains pose, he cannot bring himself to effectively deport them to wreak havoc in their old universes. So instead, he tries desperately to help each of them to become better people who can live peacefully in any universe.

Each of these supervillains has a different background and unique challenges that contribute to their evil behavior. Since I don’t have the room in this article to talk about all of them, I’ll focus on just one. That supervillain is called Electro and he is played in the movie by Jamie Foxx.

Electro has the ability to literally siphon electricity from electrical grids and to fire it in lightning-like bolts and bursts. His destructive power is fantastic. But when Spider-Man manages to destroy his electrical emitter, Electro immediately becomes your uncle. Suddenly he is no longer a crazed and maniacal supervillain, but a pretty ordinary next door neighbor. He is no more crazed and maniacal than your typical muffler-repairman and just about as dangerous. In fact, once his power is taken away, it’s hard to imagine that he was ever any kind of threat.

This sudden and dramatic transformation isn’t as unlikely as it may seem at first. Superpowers do actually exist in our real world, and they do induce the same kind of deadly behavior in many otherwise harmless people. Take those superpowers away, and those real-world supervillains are just your uncle, your neighbor, or your muffler-repairman.

These real-world superpowers most typically take the form of public or private office, wealth, or guns.

High offices are in limited supply. And great wealth is still relatively hard to come by. So while dangerous, people with those superpowers are somewhat rare. While they do exist and can do great damage, there can never be too many Donald Trump or Lex Luthor type supervillains in the world. And also, these supervillains are somewhat constrained by the precariousness of their positions of power.

But anyone today can buy a semi-automatic weapon and become a real-world supervillain that rivals Electro in destructive power. And relative to the rich and the office-holders, many of these people have few constraints that restrain their unleashing of that power – at least one time.

As Spider-Man often repeats, “with great power comes great responsibility.” There are certainly some, like Spider-Man, who take that to heart and strive to use their power, their office, their wealth, or their gun, to make the world a better place.

But it is also true to observe that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And as Spider-Man: No Way Home shows us, there are many who are intoxicated by great power and who, like Electro, would be perfectly decent citizens if not for that power.

So yea, guns.

Guns grant anyone a superpower. By making guns so easily available, we have created a nascent army of actual and potential supervillains.

Many rationalize that guns are not the problem. But that is simply wrong. As Spider-Man: No Way Home shows us, the means to destroy is exactly the problem. When people who can be drawn toward violence are allowed to have guns, it’s like giving Electro his superpower back. Without that power, he is not particularly dangerous. But with that power in his hands, he cannot help but become a supervillain.

For too many people, the lure to use their superpower can be overwhelming. If you could shoot lightning bolts, how could you not? You possess a voice. Are you never frustrated enough to shout out in anger with it? The mere possession of a superpower fundamentally inverts every calculation. With guns, your muffler-repair guy becomes a mass shooter. Without guns, well he’s just your muffler-repair guy.

Electro could not both possess a device of mass destruction and not use it. Modern guns grant less flashy but similarly destructive superpowers. We should not be so foolish as to give everyone access to them. Giving everyone access to Twitter is dangerous enough.

Spider-Man realized this. The weapons are the problem, not the people who possess them.

Spider-Man gets it. Why can’t we?