Is it forcing us to "pay off" technical debt or is it starting us on a compulsory endless treadmill of feature-neutral fix-work? Collectively, we just won't know for a while.

It totally feels like the former if you watch it find and fix vulnerabilities or other debt-tasks one after another.

But only so many of these "technical debt" issue are little off-by-one errors that get remedied by a surgically narrow patch.

Many enough require some kind of restructuring or redevelopment of their own and it's going to take time to figure out if AI faces the same dilemma as human developers: where each non-trivial change carries the risk of some new issue, ad infinitum.

If that happens to be the case, and AI isn't able to magically produce perfect software in finite time, then what's really happened is that the threat of hostile AI exploiting our technical debt will force us to always be burning and churning code just to remain a moving target.

It's another "we'll see" thing for now, I think.

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intrasight an hour ago | parent [-]

The original technical debt, which cannot be paid off, was the decision to use a Von Neumann architectures instead of a Harvard architectures for CPUs.

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victorbjorklund an hour ago | parent [-]

Explain? (Genuine question because I wanna know)

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GTP an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Basically, have an explicit distinction between data and code at the architectural level, to enforce "Write xor Execute" in hardware. In this way, you would prevent e.g. a buffer overflow letting an attacker injecting shellcode that gets executed later by somehow pointing at it. AFAIK the issue would still remain with some programming languages though.

	▲	sznio 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		don't we already have the NX bit? and it's not sufficient anyways. even with NX you could have the attacker control a function pointer you call. in any sufficiently complex program you'll have enough widgets to build anything you want just out of data. code and data are the same thing. whatever inputs your system receives is "code" that your application interprets, just like your application is the code that the CPU interprets. turtles all the way down.
	▲	tosapple 37 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		and we don't believe a sterilized virtual machine creates a similar situation? any respective machine doesn't require full Turing completeness? any ad-hoc machine allows for mutations and flexibility, which I'm sure is an added strength. 2nd edit, Also, didn't we have a weaker model of this with segmented non-flat memory models on i386-

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rdevilla an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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