RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Wednesday 11 October 2023 Volume 33 : Issue 89

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator

***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/33.89>
The current issue can also be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

Contents:
Autonomous Vehicles Are Driving Blind (NYTimes)
How a Series of Air Traffic Control Lapses Nearly Killed 131 People
(NYTimes)
A private jet took evasive action to avoid a fighter plane in Austin
(WashPost)
How Israel's Feared Security Services Failed to Stop Hamas~<'s Attack
(NYTimes)
What was 60 Minutes thinking, in that interview with Geoff Hinton?
(Substack)
Your Medical Devices Are Getting Smarter. Can the FDA Keep Them Safe? (WSJ)
Fake at scale: Generative AI looms over global elections cycle
(Politico Europe)
Amazon's Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen (WashPost)
Verified accounts spread fake news release about a Biden $8-billion
aid package to Israel (NBC News)
Airworthiness Directive Mandates Garmin Autopilot Software Fix (AVweb)
Inside the final seconds of a deadly Tesla Autopilot crash (WashPost)
Why a search engine that scans your face is dangerous (NPR)
How Amazon's Ring camera network alters L.A. neighborhoods (LA Times)
Connected cars' dirty little secret: They're the trailing edge of 5G
adoption (Light Reading)
Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries (NYTimes)
Google is making their weak and flawed passkey system the default login
method -- I urge you NOT to use them! (Lauren Weinstein)
Vietnam tried to hack U.S. officials, CNN with posts on X, probe finds
(WashPost)
California's 'right to repair' bill is now California's 'right to repair'
law (Engadget)
Airbnb guest in luxury rental has refused to leave or pay (L.A. Times)
WhatsApp says warnings of a cyberattack targeting Jewish people are baseless
(NBC News)
Inside FTX's All-Night Race to Stop a Billion Crypto Heist (WiReD)
Re: False news spreads faster than the truth (Martin Ward)
Re: Rooftop Solar ongoing maintenance issues (David E. Ross)
Re: Google accused of directing motorist to drive off collapsed bridge
(Jim Geissman)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 19:20:53 -0600
From: Matthew Kruk <mkrukg@gmail.com>
Subject: Autonomous Vehicles Are Driving Blind (NYTimes)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/opinion/driverless-cars-san-francisco.html

In San Francisco this month, a woman suffered traumatic injuries from being
struck by a driver and thrown into the path of one of hundreds of
self-driving cars roaming the city's streets. San Francisco's fire chief,
Jeanine Nicholson, recently testified that as of August, autonomous vehicles
interfered with firefighting duties 55 times this year. Tesla's autopilot
software, a driver-assistance system, has been involved in 736 crashes and
17 fatalities nationwide since 2019.

For all the ballyhoo over the possibility of artificial intelligence
threatening humanity someday, there's remarkably little discussion of the
ways it is threatening humanity right now. When it comes to self-driving
cars, we are driving blind.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 09:01:01 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: How a Series of Air Traffic Control Lapses Nearly Killed
131 People (NYTimes)

Two planes were moments from colliding in Texas, a harrowing example of the
country's fraying air-safety system, a *New York Times* investigation found.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/business/air-traffic-control-austin-airport-fedex-southwest.html

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2023 23:26:57 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: A private jet took evasive action to avoid a fighter plane in
Austin (WashPost)
The aircraft came within 200 feet of one another, according to a preliminary
FAA account, in an incident that also involved a third aircraft.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/10/10/austin-near-miss-military-private-jet/

------------------------------

From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 09:01:01 -0400
Subject: How Israel's Feared Security Services Failed to Stop Hamas's Attack
(NYTimes)

Israel’s military and espionage services are considered among the world's
best, but on Saturday, operational and intelligence failures led to the
worst breach of Israeli defenses in half a century.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-security-failure.html

[This is way beyond the ability of RISKS to encompass. See
* Thomas Friedman, This Hamas-Israeli Fight Will Send Shock Waves
Far Away, NYTimes opinion, 9 Oct 2023
[Almost Everything is Interrelated. PGN]
* Bret Stephens, The Yom Kippur War Led to Peace. This One Can. too.
NYTimes opinion, 9 Oct 2023
* The Editorial Board, The Attack on Israel Demands Unity and Resolve,
10 Oct 2023
* Thomas Friedman, Israel Has Never Needed to be Smarter Than Now,
NYTimes opinion, 11 Oct 2023
* The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself
NYTimes opinion, 11 Oct 2023
PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2023 23:59:30 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: What was 60 Minutes thinking, in that interview with Geoff
Hinton? (Substack)

Scott Pelley didn’t exactly do his homework

Scott Pelley: Does humanity know what it's doing?

Geoffrey Hinton: No.

Gary Marcus: I tend to agree. When it comes to AI in particular, we are
getting way ahead of our skis, rushing forward a technology we don’t fully
understand. For all the differences we have had over the years, I salute you
for speaking out.

Geoffrey Hinton: I think we're moving into a period when for the first time
ever we may have things more intelligent than us.

Scott Pelley: You believe they can understand?

Geoffrey Hinton: Yes.

Scott Pelley: You believe they are intelligent?

Geoffrey Hinton: Yes.

Gary Marcus: As it happens I sharply disagree with all three of the points
Geoff just made. To be sure, it’s all partly definitional. But I don’t we
are all that close to machines that are more intelligent than us, I don’t
think they really understand the things that they say, and I don’t think
they are intelligent in the sense of being able to adaptively and flexibly
reason about things they haven’t encountered before, in a reliable way. What
Geoff has left out is any reference to all of the colossally stupid and
ungrounded things generative AI systems do routinely, like fabricating the
other night that Liz Cheney had replaced Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, by
220-215 vote that never happened, or learning that Tom Cruise's is the son
of Mary Pfeiffer and yet not being able to infer that Mary Pfeiffer is Tom
Cruise’s mother, or claiming that two pounds of feathers weigh less than one
pound of bricks. Geoff himself wrote a classic paper about trying to get
neural networks to infer family relationships, almost forty years ago; it’s
embarrassing to see these systems still struggle on such basic
problems. Since they can’t reliably solve them, I don’t think we should
attribute "understanding” to them, at least not in any remotely deep sense
of the word understanding. Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru have called these
systems “stochastic parrots”, which in my view is a little unkind to parrots
-– but also vividly captures something real: a lot of what we are seeing now
is a kind of unreliable mimicry. I really wish you could have addressed both
the question of mimicry and of reliability. (Maybe next time?) I don’t see
how you can call an agent with such a loose grip on reality all that
intelligent, nor how you can simply ignore the role of mimicry in all this.

https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/what-was-60-minutes-thinking-in-that

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 07:47:48 +0000
From: Richard Marlon Stein <rmstein@protonmail.com>
Subject: Your Medical Devices Are Getting Smarter. Can the FDA Keep Them
Safe? (WSJ)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/your-medical-devices-are-getting-smarter-can-the-fda-keep-up-acc182e8?mod=tech_lead_story (use
https://history-computer.com/how-to-read-articles-behind-a-paywall/ to bypass paywall).

The WSJ's headline is oxymoronic.

The FDA is attempting to adapt medical device regulations to accommodate
AI's ability to learn and, thereby, improve patient outcomes by evolving
device capabilities without re-qualification processes as traditional
practiced. The medical industrial complex's adoption of AI promotes
extractive profit while compromising improved patient outcome experience, a
recipe to accelerate consumer brand outrage and trust erosion.