I think this is bad news for hackers, spyware companies and malware in general.
We all knew vulnerabilities exist, many are known and kept secret to be used at an appropriate time.
There is a whole market for them, but more importantly large teams in North Korea, Russia, China, Israel and everyone else who are jealously harvesting them.
Automation will considerably devalue and neuter this attack vector.
Of course this is not the end of the story and we've seen how supply chain attacks can inject new vulnerabilities without being detected.
I believe automation can help here too, and we may end-up with a considerably stronger and reliable software stack.
I don't think it matters one way or the other to your thesis but I'm skeptical that state-level CNE organizations were hoarding vulnerabilities before; my understanding is that at least on the NATO side of the board they were all basically carefully managing an enablement pipeline that would have put them N deep into reliable exploit packages, for some surprisingly small N. There are a bunch of little reasons why the economics of hoarding aren't all that great.
Maybe I am slightly paranoid or reading too much dystopian fiction, but the collar thing does not seem to really be about cows, if Thiel is involved. More like a portable prison, fully decentralised and highly technological.
I think that many signs are indicating that Japan will re-emerge as a major technology powerhouse in the coming decades. And being confronted early to demographic transformation will end-up being an advantage. On the opposite side I think that immigration is a temporary band-aid that doesn’t solve any of the structural issues.
I'm also curious why they imagine a future-Japan-tech-powerhouse. I think Japan has a lot of potential for growing and improving as a place to live (especially if they embrace growth, instead thinking tiny-steps will convince women in Japan to magically start having babies[0])
Additionally, all signs do, in fact, point to fewer new immigrants to Japan in the coming decade.
Miti is basically a second government with real power, finance and expertise, and they appear to bet on the correct things, it should have happened earlier but from what I have seen they are moving faster than EU on the semiconductor and robotics fronts.
Sure, take that stricter immigration control. But if people assume upfront that immigrants are intrinsically the source of problems and it takes stricter and stricter controls to filter them down to only those that bring value, this strengthening of filtering will never end.
Remember that one does not _either_ bring value or cause problems. I expect a typical human being to bring some value and cause some problems at the same time. And you can never measure which one is bigger.
I never said that all immigrants are intrinsically a source of problems, and saying that any filtering inevitably leads to never-endingly stronger filters is a slippery slope fallacy.
You absolutely can measure the likely degree of problems an immigrant would bring. To an absurd, extreme, example: you have 1 spot open for immigration. Do you offer it to a semiconductor EE with a clean criminal record in his early 30s, or a 68 year old alcoholic high school dropout with multiple violent criminal convictions?
It's relatively easy to design a system that prioritizes skilled, contributory immigration: academic background, professional career, salary, age, ability to speak the host country's language, skills of relevance, health/fitness, etc.
Sure, the EE from my example can snap and commit a crime, or lose his job and get addicted to drugs; but at a population level, it's inarguable that some groups will cost a country and others will benefit a country.
The "skilled" immigrant is largely a myth. Many countries now have more graduates than ever before with rising graduate unemployment while these "skilled" immigrants just usually end up being another mediocre tech worker. The GDP per capita hasn't been growing since the crash in 2008 for many European countries despite the influx of "skilled" immigrants.
It is mostly propaganda. Said immigrants will likely still never truly socially fit in even with great effort.
It's not as if Japan (or any other country, for that matter) doesn't already have immigration restrictions. Japan uses a points-based merit system for permanent residence [1], not unlike the criteria you suggested. Just to give an example, having a PhD and speaking Japanese at an N1 level (~equivalent to B2 CEFR) is barely sufficient to qualify (unless you're older than 30, in which case it won't be).
The more interesting question to ask is: Why has Japan decided to tighten immigration requirements now? But in my opinion the answer is rather obvious, especially when you consider the current Prime Minister's nationalistic beliefs: It's much easier to blame foreigners for insufficient welfare, ailing infrastructure, etc than to actually improve welfare, infrastructure, etc.
Also, the example of "a 68 year old alcoholic high school dropout with multiple violent criminal convictions" is rather ridiculous. You're arguing a strawman. It's already impossible for such a candidate to immigrate almost anywhere barring some other exceptional circumstances.
This is misleading at best, straight up false at worst.
The points-based system is used to allow you to apply for a PR _on an accelerated timeline_; not apply at all.
Having 70/80 points lets you apply for a PR after being a resident for 1/3 years respectively; you can apply without any points after living here for 10 years.
Fair enough, I should have mentioned that the points-based system is for an accelerated application. The fact was on my mind as I was writing but I see that I forgot to mention it. My bad.
But I will point out that ten years is a major commitment. Surely if someone can hold a job for ten years the default assumption should be that they're contributing to society, not leeching off it.
My example is ridiculous, but it was the easiest way to point out the fallacy that "you can never measure which [immigrants bring value or cause problems]. You clearly can.
And no, that 68 year old alcoholic is free to pass into America under Democrat administrations and tens of thousands have. They technically are illegal, but if you selectively enforce immigration laws and offer things like asylum/refugee status without any checks or balances, the net effect is still the same.
Returning to Japan, as the other commenter pointed out, your PhD example is someone that qualifies for expedited permanent residency, a particular subset of migration that Japan has (correctly) decided to encourage.
The problem is that if you make the place feel very unwelcoming to newcomers because you don't want the people who bring problems, the people who bring value don't come either unless you're offering extremely high pay, which Japan does not.
Unwelcoming to immigrants with problems doesn't necessitate unwelcoming to all immigrants.
Japan's culture doesn't take well to immigration, but Canada bars many immigrants or even visitors on the basis of DUIs - I don't have a DUI, and I'd have to jump through many hoops to migrate to Canada regardless, but nobody can earnestly say Canada isn't receiving many, many (too many?) migrants.
Other than that loony High-School "Nostradamus", what signs do you see ?
They have some core technologies in some niches, but they lag behind both the US & China in Tech. This is esp. true in Robotics, and their academics/industrialists have massive egos & racial pride from a bygone era to ever be able to bridge this gap with immigration. They even removed the Phd scholarships for people moving to Japanese Universities (which have been falling in competitiveness for decades)!
I agree immigration is a band-aid, but that doesn't mean it can't be successfully used while planning and managing structural changes long term.
Of course that does make the issue more nuanced and harder to advocate for when we have all seen politicians don't usually push for long term solutions if their band-aid solution will outlast their term of office.
Fully agree and this something I only fully realised quite late in life.
One of the implications is that at any given point in time, the vast majority of human knowledge is living in people's brains and cannot be stored. The seemingly ineluctable and almost mechanical progression of technology is happening on a thin margin between generational losses.
Maybe not so thin: much humans' knowledge is embedded in things we create (outside of language).
For example the design of a machine may have it tolerate inputs way outside spec & work fine. It may be built to take a beating, while no manual mentions using it in a rough environment. There may be subtle or not-so-subtle tweaks done to it over the years.
So that machine embodies knowledge, that may be 're-discovered' (by observing machine in action) long after its original designer is gone.
Another example: the design of traffic systems, the layout of cities (mostly organic growth), and how it affects the flow of people & goods through that city.
That's just a few examples. In short: knowledge is stored in other ways besides books/videos etc, or people's heads.
Generational knowledge loss is often either discarded as irrelevant, illusory or misunderstood.
It is not a new phenomenon and can easily be traced back to antiquity.
Because _reality has a surprising amount of details_ the entire humanity knowledge at any given time is living in our memories, not written, and even if we had the time and will to try and formalize it, language is not complete enough and we lack the ability to fully introspect what we know.
You can ask a professional Tennis or Chess player to formalize his expert knowledge and it may contains some useful insights, but far from enough to replicate his skills.
So learning is re-discovering many things, a Sysphean task, and the majority is lost, we managed to keep just enough thanks to the invention of writing and books to reach a kind of slow escape velocity.
Because technology is constantly evolving, what is lost is not systematically relevant, like writing poetry in ancient Greek.
But there is the risk of losing too much, too quickly. As a veteran of the videogame industry I can attest that many mistakes that are made today were solved before, but the good designs and principles were largely lost.
Newcomers are not inherently less smart than their parents, quite often they just don't learn because the incentives changed.
I am not entirely convinced the emergence of "vibe coding" and other assistants will be a net gain.
The most difficult part is always to find the vulnerability, not to fix it. And most people who are spending their days finding them are heavily incentivized to not disclose.
Automatic discovery can be a huge benefit, even if the transition period is scary.
The economic angle is not as clear cut as the authors seem to think.
There is an abundance of mediocre and even awful code in products that are not failing because of it.
The worst thing about poorly designed software architecture is that it tends to freeze and accumulate more and more technical debt. This is not always a competitive issue, and with enough money you can maintain pretty much any codebases.
Even with enough money, you may not be able to attract/keep talented engineers who are willing to put up with such a work environment (the codebase itself, and probably the culture that led to its state) and who want to ship well built/designed software but are slowed down by the mess.
When you work with F500s you end up seeing code and culture that is absolute balls and that I would never work directly for all the time. And yet roles are always filled. And when the economy gets bad, they have decent engineers.
I call it the fast food quality theory of economics. When the economy is good, low pay jobs tend to have low quality employees and it shows in their products. When the economy gets bad higher quality employees end up downgrading because of layoffs and the quality of these low tier jobs improves.
The most successful software in a field is typically NOT the best software. The authors of the article live in a world that does not exist. Clean code lost, many years ago.
This is not universally applicable, especially if an algo isn't deterministic. For example if you were to time "bogosort of 100 items" you'd see increasingly better times the more runs you performed.
I also feel that a good solution of the Fermi Paradox is that interstellar travel is either impossible or too unpractical at scale and that humanity may be trapped in this system forever.
I believe that that Fermi Paradox is not a paradox at all. It's just a poor set of assumptions. Life is likely extremely rare, and intelligent life is likely astronomically rare.
Technological interstellar traveling life does not appear to exist anywhere in our Local Group.
The Local Group is only 10M light-years across. A single technological species that had arisen on any of the trillions of planets, traveling at 10% the speed of light, would only need a 100M years to colonize the entire Local Group!
We are alone, or at least the first. This is a good thing if you look at how we treat "lower" species on our own planet.
That's an enormous span of time. There's no reason to believe even a technologically advanced civilization would survive for that long. Let alone maintain the impetus for constant colonization. We gave up going to the moon in less than 10 years.
The Fermi Paradox is about the (intelligently-created) radio silence, not the lack of little green tourists. We'd eventually notice an advanced civilization in a period that intersects our time/distance coordinates (i.e., if Alpha Centaurians had radio 4-1/2 years ago, we'd probably hear it).
But otherwise, yeah, we're imprisoned here by 'c'.
We all knew vulnerabilities exist, many are known and kept secret to be used at an appropriate time.
There is a whole market for them, but more importantly large teams in North Korea, Russia, China, Israel and everyone else who are jealously harvesting them.
Automation will considerably devalue and neuter this attack vector. Of course this is not the end of the story and we've seen how supply chain attacks can inject new vulnerabilities without being detected.
I believe automation can help here too, and we may end-up with a considerably stronger and reliable software stack.
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