To Show How AI Can Be Extremely Dangerous, Researchers Tweaked The Popular Civilization V Game

Artificial Intelligence is certainly a boon to mankind. We can use it to process huge amounts of data, find patterns among gibberish, and even automate most of our everyday lives. But one thing experts have long warned us against is our over reliance on the technology.

There are lots of theories as to how AI can adversely affect us if unchecked. One of those involves a rogue AI overthrowing humanity. Sure, it’s a distant possibility at this point, considering neural networks have not yet reached that level of intelligence, but it’s not unimaginable in the future. So, a few researchers have gotten together to try and make people understand the dangers involved.

A team from the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) decided that a good way to raise awareness, is through an interactive medium. So they developed a mod for the popular turn-based strategy game Civilization 5 mod that adds a superintelligent AI colony-builder. The aim is to show the effects AI can have on humanity when it interacts with super-intelligent robots.

In Civilization V, you start out in the Ancient Era and set up your first capital city, and progress all the way through to the Future Era by the end of the game. Along the way, you research improvements from a technology tree, and that’s where this mod adds a few AI-related items. The key here is that conducting AI research provides you with improvements that could help you win the game. At the same time, researching it slowly ticks up an “AI risk” counter. When that bar fills, the game displays a message that a rogue AI was created somewhere in the world, and you instantly lose.

“We want to let players experience the complex tensions and difficult decisions that the path to superintelligent AI would generate,” says the CSER’s Dr Shahar Avin, who managed the project. “Games are an excellent way to deliver a complex message to a wide audience.” Essentially, if you mindlessly research AI in the game and don’t consider the restrictions and counterbalances needed to be put into place, it’ll be the end of you.

CSER doesn’t usually create games obviously, but the team say they wanted to reach out to people with the right skillset to tackle this problem, and get them interested. A game mod seemed like a great way to do that.