The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Katy Ilonka Gero is a human-AI interaction researcher, with a focus on technology for creative writing and understanding the limits and capabilities of large language models. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2022. Her work has been supported by the NSF and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. She is also a poet and essayist, with work published in The HTML Review, Catapult, and Wired, among others. She is on the editorial team for taper, a literary magazine for small computational pieces.