My objection (and his?) is against the claim that an AI could replicate this capability in "moments," according to the "because superhuman!" line of reasoning. I find that bogus.
Let me suggest a way:
Even easier if the OS is open-sourced.
An AI probably wouldn't need to decompile anything -- given the kind of optimizations that one could apply, there's no particularly strong reason to think one would be any less comfortable in native machine code or, say, Java bytecode than in source. The only reason we are is that it's closer to natural language and we're bad at keeping track of a lot of disaggregated state.
Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom have just released a paper surveying the results of a poll of experts about future progress in artificial intelligence. The authors have also put up a companion site where visitors can take the poll and see the raw data. I just checked the site and so far only one individual has submitted a response. This provides an opportunity for testing the views of LW members against those of experts. So if you are willing to complete the questionnaire, please do so before reading the paper. (I have abstained from providing a link to the pdf to create a trivial inconvenience for those who cannot resist temptaion. Once you take the poll, you can easily find the paper by conducting a Google search with the keywords: bostrom muller future progress artificial intelligence.)