Science, Technology, and Public Policy

Thanks to large language models, a single scammer can run hundreds or thousands of cons in parallel, night and day, in every language under the sun.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

The powerful effects of artificial intelligence are already being felt in business, politics, medicine, war, and almost every other domain of twenty-first century life. For all of its positive potential, the technology presents significant risks that are best addressed sooner rather than later.

Bruce Schneier and Tarah Wheeler describe the future of war as cyberwar. They advise that if weapons and systems aren't secure, don't even bother bringing them onto the battlefield.

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.

Tarah Wheeler critiques a new book, This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends by Nicola Perlroth, and concludes that it gets the policy recommendations right while making technical errors that could undermine trust in its conclusions.

Bruce Schneier warns that artificial intelligence will eventually find vulnerabilities in all sorts of social, economic, and political systems, and then exploit them at unprecedented speed, scale, and scope. After hacking humanity, AI systems will then hack other AI systems, and humans will be little more than collateral damage.

Bruce Schneier explains how the modern market economy, which aggressively rewards corporations for short-term profits and aggressive cost-cutting, is also part of the problem: Its incentive structure all but ensures that successful tech companies will end up selling unsecure products and services.

The security threat to worry about is the one facing the public, not the president, advises Bruce Schneier.

Bruce Schneier recommends that the United States improve government software procurement. Scrutiny cannot end with purchase: Security requirements need to be monitored throughout the software's life cycle, along with what software is being used in government networks.