Can't wait till hubris let's loose those new and improved "adaptive" and ultimately truly "self learning" worms in a few years or decades...
Yes, because that's a real risk.....
....in science fiction, that is. In the real world, this whole self-learning business is strictly theoretical. As in, we don't really know how to do it reliably.
and god forbid self replicating nanites ever life up to their potential.
Yeah, because those are a realistic threat now....
....in science fiction. The biggest somewhat self-replicating mechanism we have right now is called a
RepRap, and it lacks the capability to replicate its own basic function blocks. Doing self-replicating nanoscale machines is something we can only do by using (drumroll) bacteria. And that's a different kind of thing.
but from the article it didn't really sound "tech savy" to me, but rather more like fooling around with it because we can.
Right, yes, because a government spending god knows how much money on engineers clever enough to find a vulnerability in an enemies' weapon production pipeline, then creating an incredibly sophisticated and highly target-specific piece of software to surgically take out that pipeline without any of the messy "Let's drop bombs/send in special forces" business normally associated with such things is not in any way deliberate. This was a long-running intelligence program with a clear end-goal, and let us not forget that it worked rather well, and without any real persons getting hurt in the process. To me, that sounds like a real savvy move. But I can see how opinions might differ.
