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.”
Hacking is inherently a creative process. It's finding a vulnerability in a system: something the system allows, but is unintended and unanticipated by the system's creators -- something that follows the rules of the system but subverts its intent.
Normally, we think of hacking as something done to computer systems, but we can extend this conceptualization to any system of rules. The tax code can be hacked; vulnerabilities are called loopholes and exploits are called tax avoidance strategies. Financial markets can be hacked. So can any system of laws, or democracy itself. This is a human endeavor, but we can imagine a world where AIs can be hackers.
AIs are already finding new vulnerabilities in computer code and loopholes in contracts. We need to consider a world where hacks or our social, economic, and political systems are discovered computer speeds, and then exploited at computer scale. Right now, our systems of "patching" these systems operate at human speeds, which won't nearly be enough.
