The Age of AI Hacking Is Closer Than You Think

How realistic is a future of AI hacking?

Its feasibility depends on the specific system being modeled and hacked. For an AI to even begin optimizing a solution, let alone develop a completely novel one, all of the rules of the environment must be formalized in a way the computer can understand. Goals—​known in AI as objective functions—​need to be established. The AI needs some sort of feedback on how well it is doing so that it can improve its performance.

Sometimes this is a trivial matter. For a game like...