SAN FRANCISCO — At the BSides SF conference here on Sunday, March 22, renowned bug-bounty hunter and Luta Security founder and CEO Katie Moussouris achieved something I've never seen at a hacker conference. She got a standing ovation.
During her keynote, titled "Against the Tyranny of Optimization," she called on the audience to help determine how
AI will reshape not only the technology industry, but society as a whole.
"Right now, our labor still trains these systems reshaping society," Moussouris said as the crowd rose to its feet. "This may be the last moment we have the leverage to decide who benefits from them."
Tech workers of the world, unite
Moussouris said the world is at a crossroads, an inflection point just as significant as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The rapid development and implementation of AI could dramatically benefit humanity, she said. It could solve previously intractable problems, automate repetitive tasks, and create the "greatest engine of shared prosperity humanity has ever built."
But, she warned, AI seems to be taking us in the other direction, widening the gaps in the current "K-shaped" economy in which consumer spending is coming from only the high end of the income spectrum.
Unless ordinary people get involved in shaping regulations and making decisions about the direction of AI, Moussouris said, we will end up with the "fastest concentration of wealth we have ever seen" into just a few hands, and the rest of us will be left poorer.
In the driver's seat
To reinforce her point, Moussouris cited the
widely referenced statistic that just a handful of technology companies — the "Magnificent Seven" of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia — today make up one-third of the total value of the S&P 500.
Not only that, but these firms and their massive investments in AI infrastructure have
driven most of the recent gains in the American stock market. Amazon alone, she said, plans to spend $200 billion in 2026 to build and service data centers. The rest of the Magnificent Seven are projected to spend at least $450 billion together.
Meanwhile, Moussouris said, the UN World Food Program says spending $40 billion for each of the next five years — equivalent to Amazon's single-year AI-building outlay — could eliminate hunger worldwide by 2030.
"Let them eat tokens," she quipped.
An automated republic
But isn't all this investment in AI, the technology of the future, good for America? Not the way we're heading, Moussouris said.
Optimization of technology, she argued, always favors those who control the levers of technology at the expense of everyone else. Smoothing the way for unfettered development of AI, as the White House seeks to do by invalidating all state and local laws regulating AI, will only accelerate the concentration of economic and political power into the hands of a few.
"Power accumulates wherever optimization wins," she said. "We're moving toward an automated republic."
This process is already happening, she said. Electric bills across the country have risen nearly 30% as AI consumes more and more power. Yet the big technology companies, not homeowners, are the ones benefiting from the rate hikes as their stock prices go up.
"The AI buildout already has a subsidy from us," one of Moussouris' presentation slides said. "It is in your bill."
Everything everywhere all at once
In fact, Moussouris argued, while the Industrial Revolution changed different sectors of the British economy at different times over many decades — initially textiles, then ironmaking, then later glassmaking and paper manufacturing — the AI revolution stands to reshape every sector of the modern American economy nearly simultaneously, with major job losses already happening in the knowledge sector.
"Organizations are doing the Thanos snap," she said, laying off huge numbers of employees without warning as AI gets more powerful. "This is a technology problem that is becoming an institutional problem."
As an example, she cited Block, owner of Square and CashApp, which laid off 40% of its workforce in February.
"A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better," Block CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey (of Twitter fame) wrote in a letter to shareholders, as
quoted by CNN. "Intelligence-tool capabilities are compounding faster every week."
It's not only information workers who will be affected, Moussouris pointed out. Just as taxi drivers were squeezed out by app-optimized rideshare services like Uber and Lyft a decade ago, rideshare drivers are now starting to be squeezed out by AI-optimized driverless services like Waymo and Zoox.
Uber was initially subsidized to undercut the cost of regular taxis, she said, but then raised its prices as it became the standard. Moussouris expects the driverless services to follow a similar monetization path.
Such decisions about AI and its consequences are being made so quickly that political, legal and social have little time to absorb them, Moussouris said.
The world turned upside down
Out of curiosity, Moussouris said she asked a large-language model about the full impact of AI upon society. It told her that humanity would adapt.
Because this year's conference was themed "BSides: The Musical," this meant there had to be a song. Accompanied by a backing track on her laptop, Moussouris sang a hilarious parody — lyrics partly written by AI — of "You'll Be Back" from "Hamilton," retitled "You'll Adapt." It got two rounds of applause.
But Moussouris' overall message was serious. Decisions about AI and its consequences are being made so quickly that our political, legal and social institutions have little time to absorb them. The stakeholders are all of us, but so far only the executives of the major tech and AI firms have been allowed a say in what happens next.
To change that, she urged the technology experts in the audience to "be in the rooms" where states are drawing up AI regulations and federal agencies like the FTC, CISA and NIST are writing AI standards.
"The technology question is settled," said Moussouris. "The policy question is open."
