You're going to have a phase where very important software systems are going to be designed and maintained by people who are not developers in the traditional sense. LLMs give the MBA class an excuse to do cost cutting, which you're seeing across the board. This means either them or more junior developers will be brought in as glorified prompt engineers. The code they end up creating will be based on all the problems of the LLMs. Hallucinations, etc. After the dotcom boom and the move to digitize everything, the value of a company ended up becoming the software and data it produces. This gave the nerds a great employment leverage over the MBA class, because it's not like they were going to solve all the problems and digitize all the value. Now this trend is reversing, and the value of many non-software companies is actually in the software they produced over the past two decades. During this time, large amounts of jobs were lost after moving on premise hosting to the cloud. Now these same handful of tech companies who already own the infrastructure of an increasing number of companies, is also producing LLM agents that are meant to replace the brains and value behind their software. So if a group of AI companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc all start owning both the infrastructure, data and the brains to create and maintain the software, who really begins to own all of these companies over time?
At any rate, the failure potential of these changes are high and itself will hopefully create a lot of jobs by knowledgeable people who come in to fix the mistakes...
The article fails to explain how the UPS was connected to the server, or if they were at all. Most use USB and there is no indication that even if some elaborate thing to connect to a battery backup over starlink was used, you still have to break out of the HID in Windows, gain kernel level access, then modify machines, some of which are airgapped, and the databases in a way that not only hides external reporting as they alleged with Palantir, but also removes any records of the database transactions being modified. Maybe you could have a USBHID zero day that lets the battery backup escape mitigations built in like Data Execution Prevention in Windows, then you have a second zero day that lets you modify SQLite where the tabulations were kept, and somehow all of this was coordinated remotely. Who knows, maybe the battery backups have a network connection on them meant to prevent electrical surges, and can operate as a man in the middle for any network traffic passing to the internet or other local servers. Even better, they were able to connect to a Tripp Lite device over StarLink, which acted as a man in the middle attack while protecting the network connection from a power surge, and then this was used to interface with the Intel Management Engine or another BIOS level attack, and they got in that way.
So many options, and people can speculate all day. Proof is necessary and the voting machines and Tripp Lite devices are all still available to be audited. It's important to remember that there are powerful forces inside the U.S. and other countries that want to move people away from Democracy and voting. The best way to do this is to have a repeat of the election denial from the right to now be on the left. If that becomes standard behavior then it's game over for Democracy in the U.S.