Lately, a particular thought of mine has been increasingly recurrent: As society learns to incorporate a rapidly expanding and increasingly complicated list of technologies within itself in the name of progress and the future, the gap between those with the skills required to understand these technologies and everyone else who merely sink into an elevated level of dependency on them is going to widen at an accelerating rate.
We can see it clearly already – from smart phones, to electric autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, machine learning, drones, robots and a seemingly endless list of sophisticated cyber attacks and intrusions. We are being told continuously that a world in which all of these things penetrate every aspect of daily life is inevitable in the next few decades, if it isn’t in some form already.
Cyber security is a field that I hope to one day be a part of, and it’s exciting; but I confess it is a prospect that causes me to feel a great deal of anxiety, over both my prospective role in the field and the role of the field itself within the world I live in.
I feel anxious because I don’t believe this rampant, uncontrollable, tidal push towards the world of tomorrow is going to end well. I’d love to write about this in more detail, but for now, I’m forced to ask: what can we, as a global community, point to in the last few centuries as humanity’s greatest achievements?
I don’t have a satisfactory or planned response to this question; although now I’ve externalised it, I’m sure as hell going to have a think about it. I also want to note here that my views are most likely strongly influenced by my current situation as an outsider to the field of computer science, which I believe will contribute to perhaps an excessively negative view.
That said, I’ll make a note to think about humanity’s achievements – obviously a key factor will be what you actually consider to be an achievement, so I’ll define that too. The point of this is to eventually pen some kind of essay or treatise of my own thoughts on what modernity, and humanity’s relentless thirst for it, means in the long-term for us as a species. It’s a fascinating concept. Time to have a think.
TJDempsey 