Cyber Security
"By 2025, most of us will be using an AI Personal Assistant and throughout each day will have engagement with several different robots. By 2030, there may be more robots than humans. By 2050 we could have produced a semisentient being."
become better at discerning of what’s going on for you, you won’t even need to tell it what you want or what you think, it will know. Society will change.” Watching closely since 2008, from military and hobbyist interest in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, they evolved with rapid proliferation. Drones are here to stay, are commonly sighted and form an integral part of operations across a number of industries and domains. It is now the robot’s turn. So much so, the anticipated emergence is driving discussion around much broader social and economic impacts, including transition of workforces and as far as the consideration of releasing a global minimum wage. Each machine, be it a drone or robot creates, and brings, unique strategic, tactical and operational capabilities. Across all market verticals, the rise of the robot will be a new challenge with the obvious ‘pros and cons’ for consumers, corporates, governments and security providers seeking greater detection, monitoring, awareness and analytical tools to assist security intelligence and law enforcement. Behind this driving demand is a rapidly evolving technology and cyber security industry. We are well passed the advent of the first CCTV Camera and the migration from decade old analogue systems to fully networked and interconnected digital surveillance systems. India and
China are both progressing to a wholly cashless society and rolling out compulsory unique human identifiers, such as ID numbers and Social Scoring Systems. Facial recognition forms a core part of most city and transport hub surveillance specification requirements. In China, schools are introducing facial recognition systems. On scale, we are already approaching human brain function in the connected nodes of the planet and superseding it in terms of computational power. A classic thought experiment in AI was that if you train an AI to make paperclips and then let it lose and it self-optimised, theoretically it would mine the entire planet for materials and create an enormous size pile of paperclips, to the detriment of all else. That’s the theoretical endpoint. When it comes to Singularity often people think it is far away. Asking the top 200 AI scientists, they consider Singularity to occur within 20 years. Singularity requires two conditions. The first is that the AI can self-optimise. To get better by itself. The other condition is that we don’t stop it. Imagine an AI system that scans all the literature on machine learning, creates a thousand hypothesis about how to improve, or maybe a million, and then tests a million every minute and generates a slightly better way to improve itself, measure that improvement, increment it, and then continue on again. It is within reason we could do that in the near future. With over twenty years’ experience, Liesl assures, “I see nothing in the evolution of AI that tells me that’s not going to happen.” “The second condition,” Liesl confirmed, “is we always think Singularity is when ‘it’ gets smarter than us because we have the idea that up until that point we are just going to turn ‘it’ off. Being smarter than us, we really think we are just going to shut it off ? But really the definition is about ‘are’ we stopping it? It can have a brain the size of a newt, but if its self-optimising and there is nothing in our systems that says we are going to stop it, theoretically we have already reached a soft point of singularity and won’t know it.” “If we are creating a new life form, what kind of ‘Gods’ will we be? Do we give them human values, the same values that have enslaved millions and ruined the planet’s environment? We may not agree with other’s cultural values. Can we be culturally neutral? The giant tech platforms will just say ‘well we don’t have any control over the content’ – we’re just a platform. Liesl
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