AI is no silver bullet but it is the next step

Dubai

Despite the advancements in AI, industry experts said that the both sides (solutions providers and bad guys) will continue to innovate and find more creative ways to win.

“Yes. AI is no silver bullet, for good or bad; but it is the next step. The key question is who gets there first?” said Lee Fisher, head of security at Juniper Networks EMEA.

Derek Manky, global security strategist at Fortinet, said that it is imperative that security vendors adopt AI to keep this a fair fight. Unfortunately, black hat attackers are bound to no rules nor laws which makes them operate at maximum speed and efficiency.

A single failure of a AI system could cause an existential risk event — an event that has the potential to damage human well-being on a global scale and Technology and physics experts such as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have expressed concerns about AI, Pasha said that it is definitely a possibility in the coming years given the advancements in technology, so yes, it is a concern.

However, as Elon Musk has recently suggested, there needs to be a regulatory oversight at a national and international level to reduce the risk of human error.

“There are many theories suggesting that at some point Machine Learning will overpower human understanding. However, we firmly believe that even though ML may become more effective, make decisions faster and be less expensive than humans, the programmes will still need humans to teach them, feed them with newer scenarios and have the ultimate control,” said Dmitry Bestuzhev, Director of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team in Latin America.

Manky said that there may still be humans taking risks beyond such measures and we may eventually end up in a world where machines fight machines (physically or virtually). Without the right level of cyber resilience, as “we saw recently with the global cyber-attacks, this technology could prove to be the next super weapon”.

However, he said that if people responsibly develop and ethically apply AI, he believes it will ultimately enhance intelligence in human beings.

Imagine a possibility of using AI to parse through big data in seconds and action real-life events in real-time such as a doctor operating on a patient, or a pilot using big data to predict weather patterns and re-route his aircraft.

Manky said that AI must be handled carefully, and slowly passed more and more trust as it evolves and becomes more precise. However, 100 per cent trust must never be past. For these reasons, it is imperative that humans remain in this game and in authority.

At this moment when we speak about high-level targeted attacks, Bestuzhev said that it’s mostly about cooperation between traditional intelligence and cyber intelligence units. When both meet, the success is more probable.