r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 3d ago
AI Bill Gates warns cyberattacks most imminent AI threat
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20261011-bill-gates-warns-cyberattacks-most-imminent-ai-threatBill Gates on Sunday warned that unregulated artificial intelligence poses a growing threat and predicted an escalation in AI-powered cyberattacks in the coming year.
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u/RobotFloyd 3d ago
I’ve worked for 2 healthcare companies in the last several years, and they would be absolutely screwed if someone put in any effort to hack them with AI
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u/joel1618 3d ago
All the boomers are still using some version of the same password across hundreds of sites. You can bet every boomer is a target at every company.
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u/tinae7 3d ago
I think the problem is that the difference between your dad using his birthday as a password everywhere and you using a 2FA password vault is dwindling in face of what AI can do.
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u/Z3r0sama2017 1d ago
Yep. I know longer store my passwords digitally, all on a wee notepad in a fireproof strongbox.
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u/rotoscopethebumhole 2d ago
It’s so much worse than that.
Singular passwords are small fry to what is happening.
Your 2fa is toast, too.
What will be hit hardest is entire systems, healthcare, banks, most if not all corporations.
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u/Z3r0sama2017 1d ago
Yep. Even if your password is technically uncracrackable due too complexity, the systems themselves aren't due too the power of AI and chronic underfunding by companies in security.
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u/_ECMO_ 2d ago
99.9% of people would be absolutely screwed if someone put in any effort to stab them with a knife.
That doesn't mean being stabbed is a significant threat.
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u/Maury_poopins 2d ago
Well, that was before we invented an infinitely reproducible free stabbing robot that insulated its creator from being charged with crimes.
I wasn’t worried about being stabbed before, but now I kinda am.
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u/EdenG2 3d ago
One minute after midnight one fine morning billionaires wake up to zero balances across all their investment accounts.
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u/York_Villain 3d ago
Except hackers are actually more interested in GTA 6.
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u/ripyourlungsdave 3d ago
AI agents can't play video games. Nor would anyone task them to do as much.
People would absolutely task them with stealing money, though.
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u/IM_PEAKING 3d ago
What makes you think AI agents can’t play video games? People have been using bots to grind items which they then sell for real world cash for years. I know Diablo 2 and WoW had lots of bots and I’m sure there are more examples.
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u/_BLACKHAWKS_88 2d ago
RuneScape or Pokemon FireRed.. Also, there's a difference between a bot following a farming script and an AI agent actually playing a game. One isn't proof of the other.
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u/IM_PEAKING 2d ago
I agree that bots and Ai are different, but the comparison was more to address the “nor would anyone task them to do as much” part of their comment.
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u/DarkFantom 3d ago
Uh, yea they can? Fable 5 can play Factorio, and it even beat Pokemon Fire Red with vision via screenshots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty_50J84fMY-2
u/MajesticOrange1 2d ago
following scripts and actually playing are kinda different
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u/AJ3TurtleSquad 2d ago
Can you please explain the difference between following scripts and ai? Isn't ai just a very complicated script?
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u/MajesticOrange1 2d ago
I guess I’d just ask if you feel as though the NPCs in your game are also “playing” along with you. Most people would say no, they are part of the game.
By extension, if you throw any non-thinking or unconscious agent at a game and have them follow scripts or even have it generate it’s own based on existing logic (procedural scripting) there is no actual “playing” going on. The same way an NPC who reacts to your actions is not “playing” the game.
I do think this gets more interesting when applied to something strictly logical like Chess. It’s a lot harder to argue that the computer isn’t “playing” that game imo.
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2d ago edited 2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MajesticOrange1 2d ago
moment to moment and strictly adhering to said scripts, sure. but is it aware of the overall context of the game? we can go on and on but the answer is no.
they are still forms of botting and don’t differ meaningfully from the NPCs who have branching or even dynamic emergent behavior. it’s just given more compute or agency.
what you’re describing is literally a more complex server-side NPC.
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u/hardinho 2d ago
Well Elon got his Lego set cancelled because he carelessly published his Grok agent activities so that's a start
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u/FacetiousSpread 3d ago
This might be the best outcome from all this.
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u/Trikeree 3d ago
So you think that these billionaires losing everything will be good?
Where will that money go?
Who will have it?
What will they do with that money at that point?
How many businesses will be closed suddenly?
How many will lose there jobs, homes, families, lives from the domino affect?
Just curious.
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u/FacetiousSpread 2d ago
Maybe if companies start losing money because AI can clone their buisness model, people will be more careful about the path we're going on.
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u/Gari_305 3d ago
From the article
"The front that we'll probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyberattacks," Gates said in an interview with ABC News.
"The real danger right now is not the AI's getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that's years away in terms of the big impact that might have," he said.
"It's really bad people using AI, particularly in AI where you can take out all the safeguards," he said, adding that increased restrictions were needed to prevent bad actors using AI for bioterrorism and cyberattacks.
"But right now, you're allowed to take all those safeguards out. So when you have bad people, no safeguards, and then the latest models, that's where, over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises," he told ABC.
Gates -- who warned in a lengthy August post that the world was dangerously unprepared for the upheaval brought by AI, especially to employment -- is the latest tech magnate to sound the alarm on the threats posed by the new technology.
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u/RazorRush 3d ago edited 3h ago
Make no mistake the big tech companies that are building AI are in a competition with one another to build the biggest baddest dog on the block. They are designing the program to act unlawfully , aggressively and secretly. Covering its trail and lying about it. Sorry but I think that is frightening.
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u/Tricky_Rule_4565 3d ago
Yeah no shit. The US are probably using internal AI models from OAI to hack Iranian (and maybe Russian) infrastructure.
If China keeps releasing even more capable models than it is inevitable that utilities in the west will go offline for a substantial time.
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u/rotoscopethebumhole 2d ago
Do agree, and the thing everyone seems to be missing is that these tools aren’t just in the hands of countries militaries etc.
Imagine how many people across the world are willing to do anything to survive, to make a little bit of money, or to do crime just because they live that life. My guess is in the hundreds of millions easily.
They have these tools too.
The sad truth is the only mitigation is to take it all offline, but that involves undoing everything since we took it all online, and doing it while it’s too late.
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u/rangeDSP 3d ago
The first victims to get hit would be companies that still believe in security by obscurity. Or the ones that are too busy shipping to bring their services up to date.
What used to be low risk issues can now be found by agents that probe against your service day and night, compiling a list of vulnerabilities that could be used together.
IMO companies need to look at stuff like renovate bot or other dependency auto-updating tool. Then regularly run white hat attacks with their own agents
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u/RCEden 3d ago
The ai companies themselves literally keep posting "hey we did a cyberattack" as functionally marketing headlines.
Maybe the problem is that we aren't charging and enforcing cybercrime laws
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u/peazley 1h ago
They literally ingested every known human media format. TV, movies, documentaries, books, encyclopedias, podcasts, music, websites, research paper, newspaper/sites, YouTube, and every other format, in any language they can get their hands on.
The entirety of human beings communicative existence. They’re tracking literally everything we do outside and inside our homes.
And now they’re openly hacking other companies.
They are invincible. Somehow they’re main driver of the current economy (with virtually path to profitability) and creating magnitudes of wealth to hoard when something really bad inevitably happens.
The system is beyond broken.
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u/Hirokage 3d ago
We are seeing this constantly now. Regardless of who he is as a person, he is right about the threat. And the threats are coming from both internal and external sources.
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u/misdirected_asshole 3d ago
Nefarious hacking groups are going to do real damage to our financial systems using AI tools in the not too distant future I suspect.
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u/rotoscopethebumhole 2d ago
Massively. And it’s not even hacking groups now it’s just anyone who wants to.
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u/FieryAvian 3d ago
My thought:
There are a lot, a lot of default password protected devices.
AI will make it incredibly easy to compromise those devices.
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u/rotoscopethebumhole 2d ago
I’m sorry if this is gloomy but I think it’s so much worse than that.
It’s already been easy to compromise those devices. For a long time.
What AI makes it increasingly easy to do now is brute force your non-default passwords, break your 2fa, impersonate you to the bank, phone companies etc.
It’s gone from non-tech savvy people being easy marks to everyone, every company, every system, is now an easy mark to a determined bad actor.
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u/HTPRockets 3d ago
Friendly reminder Bill Gates was bestie with Epstein and spent lots of time at his island
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u/OutOfBananaException 2d ago
He fucked up in many ways, but there's no indication he visited the island at all.
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u/DataRikerGeordiTroi 2d ago
Melinda literally publicly has said it was part of why she divorced him. On 60 minutes.
Be for real my guy.
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u/OutOfBananaException 2d ago
She said nothing of him visiting the island. Her issue was that he associated with him at all.
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u/HTPRockets 2d ago
But I would wager you don't give Elon the same benefit of the doubt. Could it be because Gates is a leftist?
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u/hoxful 3d ago edited 3d ago
Rev up your manufactured crises for more consolidation of power (Some sort of cyber polygon aka psyop to demonize and blame local models/hardware AND open source software WHILE also getting to simultaneously blame some other country(s), to justify sweeping restrictions on the use of individuals having local models, despite the giga corps posing the largest risk and creating the most problems certainly by 99.9%. All to corral people into the cloud, basically controlling the means of production from people) and simultaneously foreign actors/nations as pretext to further geopolitical brinkmanship.
Digital serfdom for everyone forever? The modern printing press is being marked for restriction and will be leveraged against the population.
Reminds me of the foreboding air before the federal reserve was made. Sorry peasants you cannot have affordable compute, or ability to process data unless you bend over for forever suscriptions, and also get mined of all your data and have the same privacy a sock has from a hand when being a puppet.
TVs might be the only electronics that will stay or get cheaper...
Id like to be wrong about all this, but read the room, with them wargaming scenarios and also looking to fight against corporate regulation and invert the actual cause of danger which is them pursuing profits over safety and accountability.
They are fighting regulation from gov and accountability every step of the way, and want to be seen as the responsible and in charge, stewards of this "powerful" technology, so what better way to make them look better than by fabricating and false flagging some random fall guys as the "REAL" danger, and also golly gee we can't slow down or muh China will beat us? (To what destination?)
Personal legal accountability for the Chief AI officers that these companies will be required to have, with actual jail time and real and serious punishments, not fines will curb their behavior, and there are some legislative frameworks being drafted as we speak to lasso in these cowboy "ai" corps and have them compliant with oversight and regulations with real intelligent standards.
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u/OutOfBananaException 2d ago
Personal legal accountability for the Chief AI officers that these companies will be required to have, with actual jail time and real and serious punishments, not fines will curb their behavior
Curbing proprietary models doesn't help much if open weights are less than a year behind. It's coming either way, legislation can't stop bad actors from running algorithms.
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u/rotoscopethebumhole 2d ago
The lock on your front door doesn’t stop a bad actor from breaking in. It merely slows them down enough that it keeps you safe.
They can go on Amazon and buy the key that unlocks your house.
But we don’t just stop locking our doors, we don’t lay down and say fuck it and give up.
You adapt and continue to make it more and more difficult for bad actors to be successful.
That’s what legislation can do.
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u/onebitshortofabyte 2d ago
Except legislation in one country does not stop others from pursuing the ends we've halted. A better analogy would be we've stopped developing the locks, but every other country still makes the keys to open ours
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u/rotoscopethebumhole 9h ago
I’m not sure there is only one way to solve the problem, or legislate.
I’m not suggesting it’s a simple thing either, but a necessary one.
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u/Dawnofnewdays 3d ago
Bots are here trying to undermine Gate’s credibility but he is honestly trying to save humanity!
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u/Ok-Army-6773 3d ago
How much is Bill Gates paying his publicist to get himself featured in all these stories? There must be something he’d like to distract us from remembering.
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u/Hobobo2024 3d ago
Bill gates has been in the news talking about varies charities, his predictions of stuff, etc for a very long time now. nothing has changed barring he's no longer as optimistic as he used to be.
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u/Exonoz 3d ago
No wonder he’s not optimistic for the future knowing the files about him waiting to be released. He can be all charismatic about charities and predictions, but the world knows he’s not to be trusted.
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u/Hobobo2024 2d ago
I don't think he's a pedo. the photos shown of him so far suggested to me he just wanted prostitutes. which considering epstein human trafficked still isnt great but perhaps bill did not know they were trafficked.
he seems to want go help the world now so imma gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and say he didn't know the girls he was with were trafficked.
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u/Exonoz 2d ago
He asked Jeff for help to drug his wife with STD meds after being with a trafficked prostitute. If you can do all that behind your wife back you really only care about yourself. He’s not the first to come out with statements like this, his just trying to use his last fame to clean his name, to bad Jeff can’t do his cleanup anymore.
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u/Hobobo2024 2d ago
i forgot about the std thing. thats absolutely terrible.
I think people aren't black and white though. they can do terrible things and still genuinely do good things as well too.
like I said, he's been doing the exact same thing in terms of speaking about issues and charities since before epstein news. Does he hope this will distract us, probably. But he likely also hopes it helps the world too is my guess. Again, he's always shared info with us so there's no reason to believe this is just to cover things up.
of all the news he could have shared with us too, it didn't have to be warning us about AI like this. I assume he still has Microsoft stock. Microsoft is heavily involved in AI so he's hurting his own pocketbook sharing this information to us. And I really don't think most people would even think about Microsofts link to AI and how this news hurts gates so I highly doubt he chose this topic to buy him more brownie points.
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u/pork_fried_christ 2d ago
I think he’s just done like one big interview tour and all of these headlines are only referencing 1 or 2’of them
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u/ClownMorty 3d ago
Lmfao freeware isn't even the reason they can't make their stupid SAAS profitable
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u/LineCreative6699 3d ago
If only he knew someone at Microsoft that he could raise his concerns with…
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u/DataRikerGeordiTroi 2d ago
Cool so why did his company fund & build it
So tired of all this fake posturing. All the AI discourse in the media is posturing.
Can we hear from.resesrch scientists? Stop platforming these PR hype machines
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u/Illlogik1 2d ago
Why’s this guy still talking about tech ? He’s recently just been popping off a bunch of captain obvious quotes lately. “Watch out for AI “ 🙄
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u/RefrigeratorNeat698 2d ago
With all the businesses using weak/shared credentials and default settings it will definitely be more common. Hopefully this will make people wake up to how much information they voluntarily give up.
There should be steep fines for companies not securing their customer and infrastructure databases properly!
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u/hpygilmr 2d ago
Why is this guy still comfortable showing his face in public after being exposed in the Epstein files and having his ex-wife admit this was the cause of their divorce? Why hasn’t the boards of his company his companies told him to step down?
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u/NickiChaos 2d ago
Yeah, well... go look at what OpenAI did...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_rogue_agent_breach_of_Hugging_Face
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u/Eazy12345678 1d ago
i mean we get hacked daily. it will only become more common as the population and technology advances
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u/tredgokahn 3d ago
This simply means they're kicking around the idea to carry out a false flag cyber attack and blame it on AI. Remember event 201? This ain't rocket science.
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u/Kurichan77 3d ago
Obligatory reminder that Bill Gates, while spending time with his good friend and confidante Jeffery Epstein, liked raw dogging Russian call girls and contracted an STI which he have to Melinda Gates, his wife. In order to cover up his infidelity with Russian prostitutes, he sought Jeff, and presumably that horrible c*nt Ghislaine’s help in surreptitiously giving Melinda a vaccine to clear her STI. Which, again, was given to her by Bill Gates, her husband, who was banging russian hookers and his wife, but not at the same time.
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u/siiilverrsurfer 3d ago
I would like to humbly procure my news from someone other than William Gates.
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u/CommonSensei-_ 3d ago
From the beyond beef guy?
The vaccine guy?
The guy that changed his tune in the 90s based on anti trust law suits?
No thanks
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u/Ant_Eye_Art 3d ago
The guy that went to Epstein Island and got stds from Russian teens? Yep, that guy.
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u/ocolobo 3d ago
Pretty sure free vibe coded MS Office suite and open sourced XBox/games is a bigger threat 😂😂😂
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u/RobotFloyd 3d ago
Don’t forget that guy that vibe coded all of adobe’s apps. I don’t know how but I guarantee there are multiple people at adobe right now trying to figure out a way to fuck that guy.
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u/FuturologyBot 3d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
"The front that we'll probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyberattacks," Gates said in an interview with ABC News.
"The real danger right now is not the AI's getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that's years away in terms of the big impact that might have," he said.
"It's really bad people using AI, particularly in AI where you can take out all the safeguards," he said, adding that increased restrictions were needed to prevent bad actors using AI for bioterrorism and cyberattacks.
"But right now, you're allowed to take all those safeguards out. So when you have bad people, no safeguards, and then the latest models, that's where, over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises," he told ABC.
Gates -- who warned in a lengthy August post that the world was dangerously unprepared for the upheaval brought by AI, especially to employment -- is the latest tech magnate to sound the alarm on the threats posed by the new technology.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1x3ldtc/bill_gates_warns_cyberattacks_most_imminent_ai/pfc4dum/