This fall, the Belfer Center’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP) brought back the popular AI Cyber Lunch seminar series to explore issues at the forefront of technology and, increasingly, public policy. The hybrid seminar series, organized by Cyber Project Fellow and HKS Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy Bruce Schneier and STPP Fellow Cathy O’Neil, brought a wide range of speakers to Harvard Kennedy School to discuss how new and emerging technologies can be harnessed to enhance, rather than harm, society.

Bruce Schneier warns that AIs are becoming hackers. They're able to find exploitable vulnerabilities in software code. They're still not very good at it, but they'll get better. It's the kind of problem that lends itself to modern machine learning techniques: an enormous amount of input data, pattern matching, and goals that permit reinforcement. We have every reason to believe that AIs will continue to get better at this task and will soon surpass humans. They'll even come up with hacks that we humans would judge creative.