Low-Stakes AI Scenarios, High-Stakes AI Viruses, and the Trump Catering Truck Escape, With Charlie Warzel

It is November 1988, close to midnight, and a Cornell grad student named Robert Tappen Morris is staring at his computer terminal in cold sweat. He wrote a program to count the machines on the internet—a network of a few thousand computers connecting universities and military labs. To avoid counting the same machine twice, the program asks if it is already running. But Morris added an exception: one time in seven, the program ignores the answer and installs anyway. That one-in-seven exception was a terrible mistake. Certain machines are hubs with numerous load-bearing connections, and they become infected and reinfected hundreds of times. The network is strangling. It takes three days for the worst to pass. Morris is indicted the following year—the first person charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—and the government funds a team to make sure this never happens again. The field of computer security is, in a very real sense, born from his mistake.