The AI Feast

Before we discovered fire to cook our food, we spent a significant amount of time chewing. Consider gorillas, who, according to a nature show I watched, chew for hours each day. Some mountain gorillas even spend half their day gnawing on their food. But introduce fire, and you have a barbecue. The food is prepared quickly, and our bodies don't have to expend nearly as much time and energy breaking it down for digestion.

This is how I view AI technologies like ChatGPT. They're revolutionizing how we consume and process information, aiming to foster knowledge. They encourage us to think about thinking, and in doing so, they can help us better understand ourselves. Indeed, before we can effectively communicate with others, we need to comprehend ourselves. By gaining a clearer sense of our own worth, we're more likely to treat others as though they hold similar value.

However, there's always the risk of veering off course, even with the best intentions. This happens easily when we mistake the model for reality. We've been gnawing on leaves, and suddenly, we're presented with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Considering the current state of global health—with many countries, if not the entire world, struggling with obesity and poor health—the implications of this new cognitive feast could be substantial. It has the potential to amplify both benevolent and malevolent powers.

In AI and the future of humanity | Yuval Noah Harari at the Frontiers Forum , Mr. Harari breaks down some of his concerns. He’s not worried about terminator robots, he’s worried about how easily people are persuaded to do things that aren’t in there best interest. He makes a compelling point about the transformation of algorithmic functions from attention capturing to intimacy. Ultimately, he appeals to us to appreciate the power of language and leaves me wondering how little we even understand the degree to which language (a technology, and the very thing that makes up all the blocks for all our models of the universe) can be hacked, and us along with it. Now go chew on that for a couple hours.

Hello Cybersecurity World

The world has changed. In the face of Covid, the ensuing shutdowns, and social distancing, I’ve made a change as well. I’ve been an in-person kinda guy all my life. Massage is literally a hands-on job. Martial arts also involves a fair amount of physical back and forth with another person. Since working face to face with people isn’t as easy anymore, I decided to retrain myself and transfer my skillset into another field of expertise. I landed on cybersecurity.

Just before covid, I was working my way through a javascript tutorial and dabbling in some python when I came across a bug bounty video. The process of hunting down flaws in programs and networks hooked me.  I couldn’t follow the particulars to save my life, but the process was thrilling: recon, identify vulnerability, exploit, entry, cripple, exit.

It struck me how similar this was to my pain management system. Pain management is about understanding flaws in the system and building programs to improve resilience. And martial arts is the study of conflict strategies. Thus, when the world shut down, I dove into a VM rabbit hole and enrolled in the University of Oregon’s Cybersecurity 6-month Bootcamp. 

I had found a way to continue identifying weak points, building up hardened systems, and fight bad guys.

In Bootcamp, everything is remote and we (my 15 person cohort) were thrown into the deep end of the digital pool immediately. You get a machine and you load it up on your own, and then go. You better be able to follow directions, even if you don’t know which way you are going or where you are. I have been three virtual machines deep and unsure of what window I was in because my cursor was lost between interfaces.

It’s impossible to describe concisely how much material we have covered in so little time. It can break a brain. Neural networks can only take so much. I have had some serious cerebral-buffer overflow issues.

I’ve heard Bootcamp experiences described as learning by firehose. I agree and at times this has even felt a little more like learning by flame thrower. I would recommend this program if you don’t mind feeling overwhelmed. 

Many nights, my mind melted from being on the command line trying to grep answers. 40-hrs a week studying just to keep up with each new offensive, defensive, or forensic application that is introduced. I tried short cuts that were long ways back to the beginning to do it all over again and again. My rig crashed, looped, rebooted, and eventually fried its battery. I learned to live in the glow of at least three screens at all times. It’s like playing missile command but they are checking for good grammar as well your strategic aptitude.

Supposedly speaking another language in your dreams is good evidence the language is really settling in. A move toward unconscious competence. Asleep, I find myself searching for the password to my dreams, unaware I am already asleep.  It would appear my subconscious is concerned with the abstract syntax of a deeper logic. It’s trying to hack its own psychic login and get root access.  Data denied the waking me, the user.  Am I running hot or just getting warmed up? Not sure, but I am totally fascinated.

Why cybersecurity? I have thought about it and there are a whole bunch of answers. OMG, have you heard of Nerdcore? There are so many answers that I can’t put them all in this post. The next few posts should really start to give a fuller picture. 

That said, one of my favorite responses to “why cybersecurity?” is found in an analysis of three movies:  Bladerunner, Tron, & The Matrix. 

You didn’t think this could get any dorkier, did you? Grab your favorite nerd, cause it gets so much dorkier. But I digress.  Why these three movies? Long story short, they explore the perils of accelerated technological growth and the consequence to humanity.

Why cybersecurity? Because I like big ideas and what’s bigger than the transformation of humanity? Wait, but what does cybersecurity have to do with the transformation of humanity? Well, I’m glad you asked.

I will be exploring just that. In the simplest sense, cybersecurity patrols the infrastructure that makes the information-world work. Every electronic communication, bank account transfer, social media post, email, link, app, and or website/game. None of it works without cybersecurity.  

Next: Sandworm