That is always the key. There’s no need for AI in that mix. Imagine a gun without any safety, a blade with no handle, a car with no brakes, a fan with no guard, no fuse for an electrical installation,…
You evaluate the risks and you take proper measures to ensure mitigate them. Not doing them and then complain that a technology is dangerous is like doing 150 km/hr in a school zone to show that cars are dangerous.
No one seems to be talking to the network security community to get their take on the hugging face incident which is what got the ball rolling here. Their take seems to be a single company, JFrog, was behind the security holes in all three hacks and it was amateur hour security utterly unlike the sort of security in place already for power plants and weapons. but that just doesn't get the engagement of doomsday campfire tales.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/jfrog-tries-to-spin...
*An individual with the training and background to do one of these nefarious tasks does not need AI and an individual without that background and training will not be able to pull it off and will likely get flagged by law enforcement just ordering the ingredients and equipment. The Anarchist's Cookbook has been around for decades and we're all still here.
As someone who has been working on scada used in those place from one of the biggest firm out there, I was shocked by how they released their software while working there, the thing literally went in nuclear plant but nobody published any checksum, + they were shipping hard drive al around the world full of the software ready to be deployed in those super sensitive environment to the marketing team to publish everything on their joomla website without 0 care to ensure the integrity ofanything. It was sloppy as hell, and while talking to the people who were doing those things, they either did not care, did not know or a mix of both saying there are other layer to deal with security in the chain. At some point I remember an accident in that same software that made a engine do things outside what it should have, that literally killed someone and the email we receive was along the line of: we know journalist are snooping around , you just shut the f up, I left soon after and that company valuation has gone nothing but more up
most argument i see aren't that ai is needed, but that it can accelerate.
in the right hands, ai is absolutely a force-multiplier. at least in cybersec.
There's a huge difference between woodworking and watching an instructional video about woodworking unless it is a very well crafted video about woodworking. AI slop to this day does not fit the bill. just try watching one of the AI slop videos about AI to see what I mean.
There was a tweet about someone going to visit a doomer Meetup and it was taken as an axiom that AI will kill us all in the next 10 years. At one point they asked people to raise their hands if they were skeptical about it. Those who did were told to leave the room and the doomer revival meeting continued apace.
That's not science or engineering, that's pure religion. So if your starting axiom is that AI is going to kill us all in 10 years, we really don't have much to talk about because I just disagree and would put the probability of that well below 1% (nozero of course if only to avoid divide by zero errors).
i am having a really hard time parsing what this sentence means, sorry.
>There was a tweet about someone going to visit a doomer Meetup
yes, any reasonable person immediately recognizes this is very silly, and probably shouldnt be used as a representative example of what normal people are saying.
>So if your starting axiom is that AI is going to kill us all in 10 year
its not. my point is that you keep saying ai isn't "needed" to wreak havoc. most people agree with that. but the rate at which havoc can be wrought is increased with ai. this is extremely evident already.
Sure, but so does searching the dark web or releasing imperfect FSD on our city streets as well as continuing to burn coal for power. I'm not making the connection from the terrible things we can already do to the supposedly unprecedentedly dangerous accelerant in the hands of a domain expert troublemaker being any worse than the present day and world we already live in, and, we're still here.
TBF I do not doubt more mischief from AI enhanced script kiddies. And indeed AI-enabled panhandling python scripts are already harassing people, but that's been happening for decades already. If someone were able to use AI to, say, hack the IRS and release the tax returns of the richest 10,000 Americans, I'd get all the concern from the 10,000 richest Americans, but I'd laugh my butt off.
Because we already do that.
What about AI makes that more risky?
It kind of breaks the "mutually assured destruction" implicit in a super-ebola outbreak.
deliberately, instead of accidentally.
24/7 tireless work, effort is scaled much easier than humans, no ethical qualms, unable to feel fear, cannot be jailed, no care for safety, etc.
And if AI can somehow manage to achieve that then surely it could also cure cancer, or any of a thousand other dread diseases or conditions. If that's true then not using AI to cure those things would in itself be unethical.
An AI that can hack other computers can also be used to find security hole in systems so that they can be patched long before some evil hacker(tm) tries to exploit them.
I'm still waiting to see a real explanation of how AI will somehow cause genuine wide spread death and destruction. Even harder if that is somehow possible why another AI system couldn't help prevent it in the first place.