Artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, represents both a risk and a benefit to the security of society, according to Bruce Schneier, security technologist, researcher, and lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School.

Schneier made his remarks about the risks of AI in an afternoon keynote session at the 2021 RSA Conference on May 17. Hacking for Schneier isn’t an action that is evil by definition; rather, it’s about subverting a system or a set of rules in a way that is unanticipated or unwanted by a system’s designers.

“All systems of rules can be hacked,” Schneier said. “Even the best-thought-out sets of rules will be incomplete or inconsistent, you’ll have ambiguities and things that designers haven’t thought of, and as long as there are people who want to subvert the goals in a system, there will be hacks.”