In encryption, hasn’t the balance changed to favor the defender? It used to be that it was possible to break encryption. (A famous example is the Enigma machine.) Today, it is not possible. If you want to read someone’s messages, you’ll need to work around the encryption somehow (such as by social engineering). Quantum computers will eventually change this for the public-key encryption in common use today, but, as far as I know, post-quantum cryptography is farther along than quantum computers themselves, so the defender-wins status quo looks likely to persist.
I suspect that this phenomenon in encryption technology, where as the technology improves, equal technology levels favor the defender, is a general pattern in information technology. If that’s true, then AI, being an information technology, should be expected to also increasingly favor the defender over time, provided that the technology is sufficiently widely distributed.
In encryption, hasn’t the balance changed to favor the defender? It used to be that it was possible to break encryption. (A famous example is the Enigma machine.) Today, it is not possible. If you want to read someone’s messages, you’ll need to work around the encryption somehow (such as by social engineering). Quantum computers will eventually change this for the public-key encryption in common use today, but, as far as I know, post-quantum cryptography is farther along than quantum computers themselves, so the defender-wins status quo looks likely to persist.
I suspect that this phenomenon in encryption technology, where as the technology improves, equal technology levels favor the defender, is a general pattern in information technology. If that’s true, then AI, being an information technology, should be expected to also increasingly favor the defender over time, provided that the technology is sufficiently widely distributed.