Richard Socher's AI Safety Paradox: Cheaper Intelligence Favors Defenders
RichardSocher · x · 2026-09-10
Richard Socher argues against doom with an 'AI Safety Paradox': under reasonable assumptions, superintelligence helps defenders in cyber and bio attacker-defender asymmetries.
- Trigger: Microsoft's Patch Tuesday fixed 974 vulnerabilities, almost all found by AI — a record. Socher reads this as clearing long-lurking bugs, not an apocalypse.
- The model: if intelligence's marginal cost c falls and a system has a finite set of attack vectors Nd, defender budget Bd divided by c yields vectors you can proactively harden; as c→0, N approaches Nd, letting defenders 'inoculate' systems fully.
- Example: an ASI could model every pathogen mutation and preemptively develop countermeasures. The classic 'attacker only needs to be right once' intuition breaks when intelligence gets cheap.
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