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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Maybe it can't hack the servers directly if they're airgapped (though I wouldn't underestimate the power of some social-engineered fool bringing in a compromised USB) but it could hack everything around the servers, the power production, logistics, financing, communications, transport, construction

You misunderstood my point. I am saying that hacking as such will become ineffectual in a matter of years. Automated SWEs make defense drastically advantaged over offense due to information asymmetry in favor of the defender and rapid divergence in codebases. This “superhacker AGI” thing is just lazy thinking. How long do you think it takes, between open source AIs that win IOI&IMO Gold for pennies, and formally verified kernels for everything, in a security-obsessed nation that has dominated image recognition research just because it wanted better surveillance?

I believe that the physical domain is trumped by the virtual.

A very American belief, to be sure.

Agreed. I'm not convinced the space of exploits reachable via ASI is meaningfully bigger than the space already reachable by fuzzers, code analysis, and blackhat brains. ASI hacking is a fantasy.

That said, AI tools have, are, and will "democratize" access to exploits we already have. A lot of incompetent enterprise IT deployment people are going to have to get fired and replaced with people or agents that can keep up with patches.