AI Karaokeynote for BSidesSF – The Musical

When BSidesSF contacted me about a possible keynote, and the theme was “BSidesSF – The Musical,” I was thrilled. Anyone who knows me is aware of my love of karaoke. I took the theme literally, resulting in a free-ranging keynote that spanned AI, Bug Bounties, the Industrial Revolution, Universal Basic Income, and possible societal collapse – with a parody song in the middle, to the tune of Hamilton’s “You’ll Be Back”, sung from the perspective of our new AI overlords as “You’ll Adapt.”

It was quite the ride.

Can’t Stop the Mythos Music

In the weeks since receiving my first standing ovation (for the talk, not the singing), Anthropic previewed Mythos, a model that surfaced thousands of zero-days across every major operating system and browser. Many of us are weighing in on what new AI capabilities mean to our future. I also penned a music festival survival guide in how to survive the Vulnapalooza. Not enough of us are talking about the societal impact elephant in the room, and how to catch a ride on the AI juggernaut without flattening ourselves or each other.

The thing with AI is that you can’t stop the music, but you can hopefully learn to dance or sing along. While humming a few familiar notes on cybersecurity, this talk was meant to get to the heart of why most of us chose this field in the first place – to protect people.

The Opening Bars are Bug Bounty

Bug bounty has hit the first few discordant notes in the AI cyber symphony. The incentives were fragile before AI arrived. Suddenly, the melody of PoC was drowned out by cacophonous AI slop, followed by AI finding real bugs, but not all of them security bugs. The discord is so loud that some open-source teams hit the mute button and shut down their bug bounty programs.

Bug Bounty platforms themselves are shutting down, their programs getting absorbed in an industry consolidation we likely haven’t seen the end of. These are the opening bars of a longer tune about to be blasted over everything, everywhere, all at once.

The Chorus Repeats

The Industrial Revolution reshaped one industry at a time, and the cost to human workers was severe before conditions improved by regulation, not oligarch generosity. Let them eat… tokens? Phrases that begin that way typically end in revolution.

AI is reshaping every knowledge industry simultaneously, and society is not prepared. We can build AI to support us rather than extract value from us, but we have to compose the societal harmony we want, not wait for the music to be written by the powerful, in a key most of us can never hit.

In the Duel Between Humans and AI, Will We Miss Our Shot?

As some history or musical buffs may have noticed, it’s not just the song in the talk that references Hamilton. The talk title is in the style of the Federalist Papers, many penned by Alexander Hamilton, arguing to ratify the US Constitution and to ease fears of centralized power. I am also arguing for a fairer future, since we are in effect being taxed by a tiny, centralized group, literally and intellectually, to build AI.

Every household now paying higher electric bills is co-financing the buildout of data centers. Why should society fund AI automation designed to replace human labor, further concentrating wealth, if AI is not required to pay society back?

UBI as a Shared Dividend

Universal Basic Income should be a dividend paid to the humans who contributed to the AI buildout, via our ideas and higher utility bills. If a tiny number of companies can extract continuous value from the accumulated labor of an entire civilization, then our entire civilization is a shareholder.

Right now, we still have a voice in how this operetta ends. We may wish we could make AI sit through tedious policy and regulatory debates for us, but these conversations decide our future. They are the long overture we must stay awake through if we are to tap our toes to the good part.

A few companies plan to spend nearly $700 billion this year on AI infrastructure buildout, while $40B a year could wipe out world hunger by 2030.

Two futures lie before us. AI could crescendo as the greatest engine of shared prosperity humanity has ever built, or it may fall flat as the fastest concentration of wealth ever recorded.

We are still conductors of this symphony for now. It is up to us not to drop the baton.

Watch (and sing along): Against the Tyranny of Optimization: On the Stability of Automated Republics.