Comment on Open Thread: December 2009

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:46:53 GMT

No, these are high-cost/low-return existential risk reduction techniques. Major corporations and governments already have very high incentive to protect their networks, but despite spending billions of dollars, they're still being frequently penetrated by human attackers, who are not even necessarily professionals. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of computers on the Internet that are unprotected because their owners have no idea how to do so, or they don't contain information that their owners consider especially valuable.

I got into cryptography partly because I thought it would help reduce the risk of a bad Singularity. But while cryptography turned out to work relatively well (against humans anyway), the rest of the field of computer security is in terrible shape, and I see little hope that the situation would improve substantially in the next few decades.

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