The Future of AI, Security, & Privacy

Artificial Intelligence is a subject that is not just for researchers and engineers; it is something everyone should be concerned with.

Martin Ford, author of Architects of Intelligence, describes his findings on the future of AI in an interview with Forbes.

The main takeaway from Ford’s research, which included interviews with more than twenty experts in the field, is that everyone agrees that the future of AI is going to be disruptive. Not everyone agrees on whether this will be a positive or negative disruption, but the technology will have a massive impact on society nonetheless.

Most of the experts concluded that the most real and immediate threats are going to be to cyber security, privacy, political systems, and the possibility of weaponizing AI.

AI is a very useful tool for gathering information, owing to its speed, the scale of data it can process, and of course the automation. It’s the most efficient way to process a large volume of information in a short time frame as it can work faster than human analysts. That said, it can come with some detriments. We have started to see that its algorithms are not immune to gender and race bias in areas such as hiring and facial recognition software. Ford suggests that regulation is necessary for the immediate future, which will require continuing conversation concerning AI in the political sphere.

AI-based consumer products are vulnerable to data exploitation, and the risk of that has only risen as we have become more dependant on digital technology in our day to day lives. AI can be used to identity and monitor user habits across multiple devices, even if your personal data is anonymized when it becomes part of a larger data set. Anonymized data can be sold to anyone for any purpose. The idea is that since the data has been scrubbed, it cannot be used to identify individuals and is therefore safe to use for analysis or sale.

However, between open source information and increasingly powerful computing, it is now possible to re-identify anonymized data. The reality is that you don’t need that much information about a person to be able to identify them. For example, much of the population of the United States can be identified by the combination of their date of birth, gender, and zip code alone.

With consent-based regulations such as GDPR concerning the right to digital privacy, it is clear that people want to know how their information is used, why, and how it can affect their lives. Furthermore, that they want control over how their information is used.

This article was written by Kristina Weber, Content Supervisor of Centry Ltd. For more content like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog, which updates every other Friday with articles related to the security industry!