Seconding this. Maniac is a beautifully written book about von Neumann. It also led me to Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, another great read.
I was glad to see the direction this essay took. I agree with you: it's the old challenges that are gone and there's a whole new class of challenges (the former impossibilities) in front of us.
Posting for visibility a reminder that this type of watermarking is comically easy to beat. See Scott Aaronson's 2023 research in which he coined the term "pineapple attack": one must simply prompt the model to add the word "pineapple" after every other word and then do a search + replace to remove the word, to obliterate the watermark altogether.
As others have pointed out, it's relatively a lot of effort to create an artifact that realistically current systems can pretty well forge.
I don't know that there is a scalable and comfortable solution to this problem (or at least one that is scalable and comfortable proportional to the demand for it).
