20261029 0325 網路
Like everyone who has been paying attention, I have worries about the possible negative effects from AI. And it’s a long laundry list of worries. One, there is the technology’s anti-labor bias, which may accelerate our downward spiral into oligarchy. Next, there is the fact that the data center boom is crowding out investment in almost everything else, yet data centers employ hardly any workers. Third, I’m worried about the high probability that AI looks like a bubble, particularly given the sheer size of the AI boom. If it is indeed a bubble, it will inevitably burst and will probably plunge the U.S. economy back into a liquidity trap due to its size.
Oh, and Anthropic tells me that AI may well wipe out the human race, which is why I should invest in the company’s IPO.
But I guess I haven’t been talking enough to the technologists, because I wasn’t aware until last week of the strong possibility that AI will render the internet as we know it unusable — not at some point in the distant future, but in a matter of months.
It has already started. Reuters reports:
"Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators around the world scrambling to protect their systems.
"Developers of the PHP programming language on Wednesday released urgent new fixes to vulnerabilities that had been lurking in their software for years until they were uncovered using AI, saying all users were “encouraged to update immediately.”
"With tech firms warning that some hackers were already exploiting the flaws, government agencies across Europe were among those that took sites offline as a precaution.
"Because a fix is now public and artificial intelligence tools are able to reverse engineer the bug with little effort, experts said they were bracing for a wave of intrusions as hackers jumped to get ahead of the updates.
"AI was powering a “race to exploit,” said Costin Raiu, co-founder of cybersecurity research and incident response firm TLP:Black. He said the next step was the “mass compromise of every vulnerable web server on the internet."
看來我之前與技術專家的交流還不夠多，因為直到上週，我才意識到人工智慧（AI）極有可能讓現有的網路變得無法使用——而且這並非遙遠的未來，而是可能在短短幾個月內就會發生。
這種情況已經開始了。路透社報道：
「週三，在一種廣泛使用的程式語言中曝出嚴重漏洞後，歐洲及其他地區的政府網站紛紛下線；全球各地的網站運營商也因此陷入忙亂，爭相採取措施保護各自的系統。”
「PHP程式語言的開發團隊於週三發布了緊急修復程序，以解決軟體中長期潛伏的漏洞——這些漏洞此前一直未被發現，直到通過人工智能技術才被挖掘出來。開發團隊‘強烈建議’所有用戶立即進行更新。”
“由於科技公司發出警告稱，已有駭客開始利用這些漏洞，歐洲各地的政府機構出於謹慎考慮，紛紛將旗下網站下線。”
「專家指出，由於修復方案現已公開，且人工智慧工具能夠輕易地對漏洞進行逆向工程分析，駭客很可能會搶在用戶完成更新之前發動攻擊，因此一場入侵浪潮恐怕在所難免。”
「網路安全研究與事件回應公司TLP:Black的聯合創始人科斯廷·拉尤（Costin Raiu）表示，人工智慧正在助推一場『漏洞利用競賽』。他認為，接下來的局面很可能是『網路上所有存在漏洞的網路伺服器遭到大規模入侵』。”
And this is just the beginning of what Zvi Mowshowitz calls The Hackening. Two days later, Reuters reported that:
"Advances in artificial intelligence have uncovered a stream of new software vulnerabilities that are almost certain to trigger more disruption along the lines of the outages that percolated across global government websites this week, according to seven cybersecurity professionals who spoke to Reuters."
It quoted one expert as saying “I think we’re going to have a couple years where every single week it’s going to feel like the sky is falling.”
Azeem Ashar, whose Substack Exponential View has been one of my main guides to what is happening with AI, calls what happened last week “The internet’s Wuhan moment” — as in the emergence of the coronavirus that caused the Covid pandemic, which killed millions and also temporarily plunged the whole world economy into a deep slump.
I’m not a technologist, but here’s how I understand the problem: Websites run on complex, multi-layered software that, because of its sheer complexity, inevitably contains security flaws that bad actors could potentially exploit. Worse, much of the software is old — PHP dates from the early 1990s — and was hence designed in an era in which modern hacking techniques didn’t exist.
And AI models, it turns out, are incredibly powerful hacking tools. Merely human evildoers may lack the time, patience and attention to detail to go over old code line by line, finding security flaws that may have gone unnoticed for decades. AI models suffer from no such limitations. Institutions that learn about security threats may be able to install patches that block them — but the very act of disseminating a patch gives hackers the information they need to go after institutions that didn’t apply those patches immediately.
And Azhar tells us that regulating AI by requiring “safety training” — instructions to the models that deter destructive actions — will be far less effective than one might hope. Why? Because such training is relatively easy to “abliterate,” which means reversing a few key prompts in a way that undoes most of the safety training.
So what are we going to do? I don’t think we’ll be going back to carbon paper and filing cabinets. For the most part we probably won’t even have to rely on air-gapped local networks that are fully cut off from the internet. Azhar thinks that we’ll move instead to a system of partially closed domains, like AOL in its early years or the SABRE system used by travel agents, which are difficult but not impossible for people and institutions outside those domains to access.
Such closed domains are often called “walled gardens,” but I’d suggest that a better analogy is “gated communities,” like the one my late parents lived in toward the end of their lives. People who didn’t live in their community could visit them, but only if my parents had provided their names to the staff manning the gate. It worked — they could invite friends from outside over — but it was annoying and time-consuming compared with life outside the gates, where everyone could come and go freely.
Similarly, a digital society that imposes annoying security restrictions and checks but is much less vulnerable to AI-powered hacking should be workable. But security will come at a cost. How much of a cost?
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations, which I won’t share here, suggest that the advent of the open internet raised GDP by around 10 percent. A more secure system of gated digital communities will mean giving up only part of that gain — in the long run.
But I’m much more worried about the short run, because our whole economy is currently designed to work with an open web. Suppose, for example, that we’re forced to revert to the old system in which you had to physically visit a travel agent with a secure SABRE link to buy plane tickets. I remember that world, and it wasn’t horrible. But most of the travel agents and offices that used to perform that function are gone and can’t be instantly conjured back into existence. And you have to imagine that problem occurring all across the economy.
Again, this isn’t a hypothetical future risk. It’s happening as you read this.
Just the other day AI enthusiasts were talking about how their miraculous technology would soon generate 10 or 15 percent a year economic growth. That was always silly. But now there’s a very real prospect that for the next few years AI, by empowering bad guys and forcing us to suddenly adapt to new threats, will make us poorer.
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核心學術貢獻
公共角色與觀點
Just a quick note of congratulations to Bob Hall and Mike Woodford for their richly deserved Nobel. I’ll write more another day. Also, for everyone saying that this isn’t a real Nobel: Indeed, the economics prize is just an award handed out by some Swedes. This is in contrast to the real Nobels, which are … just awards handed out by some Swedes.
簡短地向 Bob Hall 和 Mike Woodford 表示祝賀，恭喜他們實至名歸地榮獲諾貝爾獎。改天我會再詳細寫點什麼。另外，對於那些聲稱這不是「真正」諾貝爾獎的人：確實，經濟學獎不過是由一群瑞典人頒發的獎項罷了。這與「真正的」諾貝爾獎形成了鮮明對比——因為後者……也不過是由一群瑞典人頒發的獎項。
換句話說，別做那種人。In other words, don’t be that guy.
Richly 的核心意思是非常「豐富地」、「濃厚地」或「充裕地」。
在日常英文中，它常常與特定的動詞或形容詞搭配，用來表達程度非常高、完全理所當然的狀態。
1. Richly 的主要用法
這個單字主要有以下三種常見的情境：
- 完全地、充分地（Abundantly / Fully）：
- 這也是最常見的抽象用法，用來加強語氣。
- 例句： He richly deserves the award.（他完全配得上這個獎項。）
- 豐富地、華麗地（In a rich or luxurious way）：
- 用來形容裝飾、色彩或服裝非常精緻、昂貴或色彩繽紛。
- 例句： The room was richly decorated in gold and silk.（這間房間用黃金與絲綢裝飾得非常華麗。）
- （食物、氣味）濃郁地（With a lot of flavor or scent）：
- 形容味道或香氣非常濃厚。
- 例句： The soup was richly flavored with herbs.（這道湯品加入了香草，香氣非常濃郁。）
2. 什麼是 Richly deserved？
Richly deserved 是一個非常道地的固定搭配（Collocation），意思是「實至名歸」、「完全是應得的」或「當之無愧」。
當一個人付出了極大的努力，最終獲得了成功、獎勵、讚譽或晉升時，你就可以用這個詞來形容那個「成果」或「獎項」是他百分之百該得到的。
- 結構：
名詞 + is richly deserved或richly deserved + 名詞 - 例句 1： Her promotion to director was richly deserved.
（她晉升為總監完全是實至名歸。） - 例句 2： Congratulations on your richly deserved success!
（恭喜你獲得了當之無愧的成功！）
💡 小補充： 雖然 90% 的情況下richly deserved是用來形容好事（如獎項、讚美、成功），但偶爾它也可以用來諷刺壞事（例如某人做壞事得到惡果，可以說那是他應得的懲罰，即 "richly deserved punishment"）。
