A possible corollary to the truism “mo money mo problems” might be “more innovation, more problems.” Technological solutions to existing problems typically create new problems. Fossil fuels are a classic example. They powered the great acceleration in living standards of the past quarter millennium—but also generated the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.
Of course, a new round of advances gave humanity the capabilities to adapt to (air conditioning) and minimize (clean energy such as solar and nuclear) this new problem—if we choose to use them. Nobel laureate economist Joel Mokyr: “The notion that invention definitely ‘solves’ a human need, allowing us to move to pick the next piece of fruit on the tree is simply misleading.” And as we “move on,” human progress continues—or at least it has for more than two centuries.
As such, it would be a big risk to bet that artificial intelligence will be an exception. Venture capitalist and AI enthusiast Marc Andreessen made a great point on this issue in his 2023 essay, “Why AI Will Save the World.” Yes, he concedes, AI will lead to “bad people doing bad things. … AI will make it easier for criminals, terrorists, and hostile governments to do bad things, no question.” Such scenarios have become easier to imagine given the increasing cyber capabilities of AI models and a flurry of recent reports about models escaping containment.
But there’s more to the story, an aspect that gets too little consideration. As Andreessen explains:
The same capabilities that make AI dangerous in the hands of bad guys with bad goals make it powerful in the hands of good guys with good goals – specifically the good guys whose job it is to prevent bad things from happening. For example, if you are worried about AI generating fake people and fake videos, the answer is to build new systems where people can verify themselves and real content via cryptographic signatures. Digital creation and alteration of both real and fake content was already here before AI; the answer is not to ban word processors and Photoshop – or AI – but to use technology to build a system that actually solves the problem. And so, second, let’s mount major efforts to use AI for good, legitimate, defensive purposes. Let’s put AI to work in cyberdefense, in biological defense, in hunting terrorists, and in everything else that we do to keep ourselves, our communities, and our nation safe.
It is through that lens—AI is a tool that can cause harms but also tackle such harms— that I view the Trump administration’s new national security memorandum “that lays the groundwork for private sector companies to take a larger role in helping law enforcement carry out offensive hacking operations against transnational criminal organizations,” as reported by CyberScoop, which notes that all operations must reviewed and approved by federal officials.
Some cybersecurity experts have already likened the effort to how the British government during the “long eighteenth century” from the late 1600s to the early 1800s commissioned private naval forces to raid enemy merchant shipping. “The historical evidence clearly documents that privateering enterprises offered an efficient and effective instrument for state governments to harm and sometimes even disrupt their enemies’ trade. In addition to professional navy forces, privateers were thus of significant strategic value to states in maritime warfare,” concludes the 2010 paper “Overseas Trade and the Decline of Privateering.”
Admittedly, this initiative has a bit of a cyberpunk feel to it, what with private tech firms being deputized by the state to go hunt digital criminals. Proper oversight is no small matter here. Yet the reality is that Silicon Valley alone possesses the speed and capability to tackle this threat. It’s worth testing if they themselves can minimize some of the problems their products create and that people already worry about.