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Testing times for smart machines

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11 November 2015

“I think a primary risk would be the over-collection of data through sensors connected to smart machines that will be more and more part of our daily lives,” said Degan. “So there will be issues around storage and retention and secure and appropriate disposal of data at end of life. We are almost into uncharted territory here with this new kind of data, which is almost unregulated.”

Paul Degan, Cyber Risk International_web

A primary risk would be the over-collection of data through sensors connected to smart machines that will be more and more part of our daily lives. So there will be issues around storage and retention and secure and appropriate disposal of data at end of life. We are almost into uncharted territory here with this new kind of data, which is almost unregulated, Paul Degan, Cyber Risk International

Smart machines are inevitably susceptible to systems interference or technical hacks, Degan points out. “After all, we have even seen software vendors’ supply chains sabotaged to the point where the finished product in fact contains malicious code. Smart machines will have to be very technically complex, perhaps even getting close to supercomputers. Some of those have recently passed the Turing test, so they can masquerade as humans. But in fact we do not want smart machines to do that. We want them to be as accurate and error-free as a machine can be. But with the constant safeguards of human override capability — the Big Red Button.”

Cyberkinetics
“I like the term cyberkinetics. Take a cyber-attack that causes a real world tangible effect, like the Stuxnet virus caused damage to centrifuges. That was cyberkinetic. We are moving into an era of software-defined everything, really, from computers to networks-military communications are all now moving towards software-defined radio systems, for example,” Degan says.

“So we will inevitably see the same with industry platforms that are in fact smart machines running on whatever host is appropriate or economic. The ‘machine’ will be smart and constantly getting smarter, precisely because it is virtual and soft. But that is hard to envisage ever being free from risk.”

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