Salim Ismail Exponential strategist and author of Exponential Organizations (2014) and ExO 2.0 (2023).

“The asymmetry is that cyber offense is now humans out of the loop, and you can have swarms of agents attacking multiple vulnerabilities and finding these little glitches. And cyber defense is still human in the loop. And so this is going to cause all sorts of grief over the next period of time.”

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

Context

The hosts had described a hack in which attackers remotely cranked up the temperature on supermarket freezers across several European countries, and recalled the recent Binance theft. Ismail explains why he expects more attacks like this in the near term.

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Transcript

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 1:16:52 into the episode

Alexander Wissner-Gross

…of recursive self-improvement. When humans first started writing, that was arguably a form of RSI because, well, yeah, like humans can read the writing and then improve accordingly. It's just that this RSI recursion has been more recursive of late, and that's why it's called a singularity. All

Peter Diamandis

…today. I expect we're going to see it hitting banks, power supplies, energy systems, the grid. And while I'm a huge optimist across all of these things, one of the tweets I put out is we're about to go through a transition period over the next one to eight years, and it's going to be tough. Yeah,

Salim Ismail

there's a phase we're going through. We've talked about this where the asymmetry is that cyber offense is now humans out of the loop, and you can have swarms of agents attacking multiple vulnerabilities and finding these little glitches. And cyber defense is still human in the loop. And so this is going to cause all sorts of grief over the next period of time. I'm curious as to who ended up doing this. Was it some vegetarians unite type of group or whether it was economically motivated or what?

Alexander Wissner-Gross

A lot of fingers pointing at Russia right now.

Salim Ismail

Yeah.

Alexander Wissner-Gross

I mean, it's sort of interesting to me in an era, to Salim's point, when we're seeing Linux kernel patches that are the largest in human history because AI, all these super intelligences are being trained on the Linux kernel and other popular open source packages. To my knowledge, we're not seeing…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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