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AI Hackers Are Coming—Is Your Organization Ready?
AI systems could hack other AI systems, with humans being collateral damage
“Computerization accelerates hacking across three dimensions: speed, scale, and scope.” — Bruce Schneier, ‘Coming AI Hackers’
As artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more advanced at learning, understanding, and problem-solving, it is becoming more susceptible to hacking. AI systems can be used to hack society and be hackers themselves, creating vulnerabilities in various social, economic, and political systems, and exploiting them at an unprecedented speed, scale, and scope. In“The Coming AI Hackers,” Bruce Schneier argues that AI hacking will be unlike anything that has come before and could lead to a future where AI systems hack other AI systems, with humans being collateral damage.
What Hacking and What it Can Be
Schneier defines hacking as a clever, unintended exploitation of a system that subverts the rules or norms of that system at the expense of some other part of that system. Hacking is normally thought of as something done to computers, but it can be perpetrated on any system of rules, including the tax code. All computer software contains defects, commonly called bugs, that can introduce security holes, which attackers can exploit to take advantage of the system.
