Mark Rowe writes in praise of the old.
Humans are having to weigh the existential risk of artificial intelligence (AI) making humans redundant or relegating humanity to the status of animals in a zoo – well looked after, even loved, perhaps; but enclosed. Well within our lifetimes, occupations that seemed steady and well-paid, and certain, are now named as ‘zombie jobs’ by Dr Paul Redmond. He was among the speakers at Carlisle Support Services’ conference in Manchester in February, featured in the April print edition of Professional Security Magazine. Not only might that lead to sudden and drastic change in society – if accountancy is one of Redmond’s ‘zombie jobs’, and it is, where does that leave university courses in accountancy, and students taking those courses?
Numerous security people like any others are trying ChatGPT or Google Bard, large language models, or LLMs, that can put words together for you, in seconds. You want a constitution for an association? Input some details and requirements, and can you wait four seconds for the chatbot to give you something serviceable?! As someone exclaimed to me, that’s what’s available free – how powerful is the equivalent inside national spying agencies?!
If you work in emergency response, again, software can alert you to an emergency, man-made or natural, sooner – all the more necessary because 24-hour news and social media demands ever more instant response, or else heads may roll. Numerous AI platforms are on offer, such as Dataminr’s. Again, that runs the risk of doing away with human jobs – rather than have analysts, let the platform search through what people are posting, to get first indications of a fire, IT outage, product contamination or whatever is causing them to complain or warn others. There’s no shortage of data; it’s just a matter of purchasing the right tool (or procuring a free one, which may require a trade-off that you have to provide your data).
Cases abound of human skills becoming less wanted than what tech can provide, meaning that people are deskilled – at the most basic, why learn how to use an abacus or do mental arithmetic when a computer can do the sums in a flash? Why pay for a human investigator if data mining software can reveal anomalies, whether of someone accessing a door or site at an unusual hour or unusually many or high invoices, each maybe evidence of an insider risk?
Private security looks like coming through the AI and tech changes quite well, because for one thing a human with Security on their lapel will still be needed physically, to control access. Yes, New York Police Department in April unveiled robots, to some scepticism, while stating that they’d be used for example to gather details in a stand-off before humans are deployed. In policing, what also matters is public acceptance. In corporate buildings, if a robot or hologram is on duty in a lobby as a concierge service, could either physically keep out an intruder?
The call for applied knowledge will remain. Last year Professional Security Magazine mentioned Genevieve Liveley, a Professor of Classics at Bristol University. It was a first – what does ancient history have to do with security management? She has been on secondment to the UK official National Cyber Security Centre and leading on the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) Futures Project. In March, Bristol announced it was home of the NSCS’s Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS).
As Prof Liveley said, ‘socio-technical cyber security might seem like a pretty radical departure from the norm’. “Whether it’s assessing the risk of moving proprietary data to the Cloud, considering the potential impacts of emerging technology on current and future industry, or designing trusted automated products, it’s critical that cyber security is informed by rigorous futures thinking – meaning the practical capability that enables us to use strategic foresight to take informed action in the present.”
To leave her for a moment, the kit being installed now – for example, in the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station – may have to work for the rest of the century. In other words, if it becomes cyber-insecure, it’ll be costly to physically rip out or stop the power generation for safety reasons. Hence the need for imagining what might be the cyber (or physical) threats after the specifiers, installers and advisers have retired or even died. This may not be a good argument for a place for humanity rather than tech, because Prof Liveley argues that we’re not very good at predicting what the future will look like (no Moon colony yet, no flying cars, no meals in pill form, and so on).
But staying with classics – who would argue for a requirement of Latin, yet the IT equivalent applies. Banks and other infrastructure still runs on old programming languages, no longer taught or used by the young when coding, yet that infrastructure needs to be kept from keeling over, let alone secured; hence some demand for older IT workers.
The armed forces, police and private security alike and numerous other occupations when recruiting the younger generation gripe that it lacks street sense or resilience. That’s not their fault or to tar them as ‘snowflakes’; if they have been ferried by parents by car, and are used to ringing for a lift from the station at night, they’re not accustomed to taking responsibility, walking in the dark home or through unfamiliar territory, having to be alive to threats or the ‘absence of normal’; knowing how to use a compass rather than a compass app on their phone.
