> Systems well beyond what is publicly known are already circulating in Washington, he says: “They can basically hack just about anything. So you get this continuous attack surface just ramping up.” From that follows a simple budget calculation: “If you spend hundreds of millions, billions on a submarine, well, guess what, a frontier model costs a hundred million. You will see a diversion of defense capability towards defensive and offensive AI, towards drones and robots.”

Firstly, I think we need to stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being on there. There are literally millions of devices with little to no maintenance plan that are the weak parts of our networks. We can massively reduce the attack surface.

Secondly, everything needs to be robust against not having the internet. Russia for example purposefully turned off their external internet during peacetime to maintain robustness. I think the majority of the West would currently fall over instantly under such a situation. It becomes increasingly clear that all services are now under continuous attacks.

> He is equally blunt about the foundations underneath all of it: “Our infrastructure is held together by twigs. The internet is terrible.” A British power plant went down for days after a hack, he says, and Cloudflare and others have come under attack. “We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years. Maybe it’s good.”

The really concerning part is that we only hear about what is discussed publicly, i.e. the attacks that are unavoidable to declare. It's well known that countries will hide breaches under the guise of national security, and companies will also do what they can to hide breaches (including paying ransoms to attackers).

But nothing will happen until it is far too late - this is the same pattern I see over and over again. And then the reaction will be over the top and likely make our lives more difficult. "Ah yes, we keep getting attacked via the internet - now you need to have an interview, get a license and pay a license holder fee just to surf the web."