Vetting of Artificial Intelligence’s Future Use
The machine learning artificial intelligence of today is a big proof of the persistence of the 1965’s Moore’s Law. Not all of us wanted a ‘supreme overlord’, as both Elon Musk and the recently deceased Dr. Stephen Hawking have been echoing for quite a while. However, Hollywood’s continued mixed story of AI being bad in one film, and good for the world on the next. The reality of the situation is we are embracing machine learning AI for quite a while, with Apple’s Siri released in 2011, while its direct competitor, Google Now was introduced in July 2012.
With the public release of AI systems through our smart devices, the fear of AI has been prevented. It comes naturally for us to have our smartphones suggest to us the nearest restaurants in the area we are in or remind us of our daily schedules. Cybersecurity issues can also be minimized, as artificial intelligence systems operate 24/7/365 with no need for downtime compared to a human system administrator monitoring the network and the rest of the computer installation.
The heuristics capabilities of various antivirus brands are improving year-on-year, with lesser chances of producing false positive results as the scanning engine learns new tricks on its own. The lowest levels of AI still maintain dependence on the human intellect of judging whether something is correct or not. In terms of a heuristic scanning procedure, undetermined cases will be escalated through a virus report, this especially encoded file is then sent to a human cybersecurity expert for a more thorough investigation, which always includes reverse-engineering techniques.
The current limit of AI at the moment is it thinks like a human toddler, or even less than that, a human baby. It doesn’t have the capability of a ‘imagine scenarios’ and decide based-on those imagined scenarios. Words thought experiments and Artificial Intelligence cannot be used in the same sentence, as machine learning techniques are still very primitive to give AI devices the capability to perform thought experiments.
However, this does not mean that AI can never help with keeping our world a more secure place. Monitoring systems, especially those that are used in the enterprise have enough AI capabilities to keep the network secure. Many intrusion prevention hardware have been manufactured to not only include the current AI technology, but also the capability to be patched with new firmware containing more updated code that makes the AI installed in the device basically more intelligent than the previous version.
What AI lacks with precision decision making based-on abstract concepts like any adult human can do without second-guessing, they compensate with pure speed. Just like how turn by turn navigation through the use of GPS device have been expanded, all of us basically have a very useful GPS receiver now without smartphones. These turn-by-turn navigation systems are very fast in determining the shortest possible path to take in order to arrive in the intended destination, based on the traffic data it gathered seconds ago. Such decision-making prowess speed-wise cannot be matched by a human. We are very lucky that in our era, we are witnessing massive changes and improvements in the way we live.
Julia Sowells960 Posts
Julia Sowells has been a technology and security professional. For a decade of experience in technology, she has worked on dozens of large-scale enterprise security projects, and even writing technical articles and has worked as a technical editor for Rural Press Magazine. She now lives and works in New York, where she maintains her own consulting firm with her role as security consultant while continuing to write for Hacker Combat in her limited spare time.