Hey, everyone.
Just wanted to let you know about our new video on cybersecurity.
We got to check out a cybersecurity control center, so that's where they screen for massive
worldwide cyber attacks.
We also got to speak to a bunch of hackers, and actually see a hack happen live.
But before we get into that, we wanted to share some of our previous videos on cybersecurity
from some experts in the field.
So this episode originally aired on October 11, 2017.
Hope you enjoy, and remember to also check at RealVision.com to watch the new season
of Discoveries, where we dive into the implications of the internet of things.
That's everything from smart thermostats to internet connected cars and Wi-Fi coffee makers.
It's definitely something you don't want to miss.
So make sure to sign up for your 14 day free trial.
I'm really excited about the next interview.
Arthur Keleti is a cyber-secret futurist.
It sounds very confusing and complicated because it is.
But the point being is Arthur is a true expert on what's going on in cybersecurity,
what's going on with our secrets, and what's going on in the battle of the machines,
artificial intelligence, and the role that that's
going to play in society overall, not just in the business world.
And I think these kind of topics are really important for us to flesh
out, not because they're immediately actionable, but because they're going to affect all of
our futures.
They're going to affect the future of the businesses we're involved in, the costs
of doing business, and just of society as a whole.
So I think it's a broad think around a topic that's really important for everybody to get
a grasp on.
Arthur also has a book called The Imperfect Secret where he talks about the secret society
and how we try and hold onto our secrets and the war that we're in.
I think these things are going to be super fascinating.
Let's see what Arthur's got to say.
Arthur, great to meet you here in the rainy Cayman Islands.
Thanks for having me.
So talk to me how you are looking-- what's the big picture you are looking in the
cybersecurity issues?
Is it the people level?
Where is your particular angle and fascination right now?
It's hard to say.
I mean, there's a big hype around cybersecurity now, especially
because nobody has the faintest idea what to do with it.
And that's a problem.
I mean we all understand that our systems need protection.
But the thing is-- and I can say it since I'm
an engineer also-- we have managed to make them so complicated that sometimes we
cannot protect them properly.
But this is something we are not really talking about,
especially not in cybersecurity conferences.
There everything is like a rose garden, like super nice and smelly and beautiful.
But in reality, the problem here is that we've got so many challenges in cybersecurity, yes,
from the human side, but also we got a lot of problem from vulnerabilities in software,
what is there all the time.
So we've got a lot of challenges, a very wide spectrum of challenges.
And we need to come up with solutions to all of these challenges.
So I'm interested in both the vendor side of the problem, how to solve these things
from the engineering point of view, because that's
also very interesting.
Like for example a DDoS attack, a denial-of-service attack, is really
hard.
And it's really hard to protect your environment against it.
But, literally, you have seconds to come up with something.
So for that, you need to build a brilliant machine and we just have that.
I mean we have very good applications against denial-of-service
attack.
So from the engineering point of view, it's a brilliant solution.
But I also have to take into account of all the human aspects.
Since at the end of a day, it all boils down to people because we are using the systems.
And that's why I'm more interested in the human side, because I think it's a bit more--
I think it's tricky.
It's really tricky.
It's not like bits and bytes.
It's more like feelings and thoughts.
So before we go a bit more into the human side of things.
What is the threat out there?
I don't think even people understand, even people watching this, I think the view of
where it is of a few kids in Eastern Europe trying
to steal a few things offline-- online-- is not where
the industry really is.
We kind of hear about state involvement.
Nobody really knows what that mean.
Give us the scope of how big an issue this is, what's really going on.
Yeah.
Well, it's not easy.
The biggest problem is that people believe that hackers in
cyberspace got like a very strange motivation.
It's hard to imagine be the hacker.
And they kind of believe that a hacker is a bad guy
who tries to hack into the system just for maybe
for fun or for profit.
But I think we have left that behind really, really long ago.
Today, state sponsored attacks are really dangerous.
Only China has 30,000 to 40,000 hackers.
As part of the government payroll.
Of course, employed by the government.
And all the other countries are trying to catch
up.
The US is trying to get as many people as they can board.
Of course, there's a little bit of problem here, because recruiting people
for the government is not easy especially in an
area of cybersecurity where you can get a lot of money from private companies.
So like why would I join the government?
I think it's a little bit easier in China.
I'm not familiar with their methods, but I can imagine.
So, but on the other hand, I mean there are state sponsored attacks.
And also the cyber criminals, actually like real criminals, move
to the cyberspace because it gives them the kind of anonymity that they require.
And they can also make a lot of money.
Like just take ransomware.
When they can hold your computer for ransom.
And if you're not paying that $10, $100, whatever you name it, then, you
know, all data is going to be deleted or worse sent to the dark web.
Maybe they are just selling your data.
Or maybe you're paying and they're selling your data, you never know.
And so through these campaigns, the people behind the campaign can get somewhere
between $10 million to $30 million, if they are doing it right.
So it's big business.
When there's business, they are doing source.
So there's two branches here-- we've got the state guys, what are they trying to do?
What was the point of what they're doing?
Why 40,000 hackers?
What is China trying to want to get out of this?
Because information is power.
After we went from paper to computers, now we are
putting everything into data servers.
And we are hosting a lot of very vulnerable, sensitive
information everywhere.
So let's say, you're going to have a negotiation, maybe state level
or maybe a mixture of state, private level.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a lot of information about the company that you're willing to buy,
for example, or acquire?
That's nice.
And that's something that China is probably actively
doing.
So they need a lot of resources.
But I wouldn't say that these countries are the bad guys.
Everybody's doing that.
Yeah.
But, there's always an impression that it's Russia and China that are doing it and
maybe Iran and possibly Israel, but nobody else.
We don't do any of this stuff.
Yeah.
Of course, everybody else is innocent.
Yeah.
And it's not like that.
You know, it's a war.
There's a cyberwar going on.
Maybe it's not visible, just as the Cold War, maybe you remember that.
But it's going on.
And I believe that whatever nation gets enough resources to get more information from the
other is winning the game.
So it's going on all the time and everywhere.
Smaller nations, they complain.
But not because they want to be the good guys, because they don't have
the money and they don't have the resources.
So what else they can do?
They complain.
Like, you know, the big governments are doing-- you know, they're spying on us.
Yeah, because if you got the resource, you would
do the same.
And then they're using it on their own people, as well, I presume.
Well it depends.
But if I was government, I would do it.
Because, it's like you just simply need to know what's going on.
And before it was different.
You got all that information from, let's say, financial data, maybe some
reports, But today if you really want to know what's
going on and what's going to happen like maybe during the next elections, the best
is if you have that information from your own
citizens.
And it raises a lot of questions, because obviously citizens would not really be
happy about that.
They wouldn't authorize spying on them.
They don't want that.
But they also want security.
And it's a very interesting situation.
It's controversial, because how would you expect that someone's going
to protect you if they cannot look into your data?
But in the same time, if that government or if that organization is looking into your
data, do you really want them not to realize if something is going on?
Like if there's a terrorist activity or if something going on
that would kind of endanger the whole state or
maybe your family?
So it's like who's going to decide what part of that information can be
used and for what?
And I think that that is the kind of dilemma nobody can solve.
So I just find it interesting how much of our data we've willingly given away to the
private sector.
We're worried about the government, yet we've just given it away to the
private sector.
And who's to know that they can't do terrible things with it, too.
Oh, well, they can't because there are laws and regulations in place.
Do they follow them?
Well, we don't know.
Let's hope that.
The actual problem is that it's really hard to
classify data today.
I mean it's hard to say what information is sensitive and what is not
sensitive, because it's context related.
And today, what we do is that we dump all that data
into these social systems and software and whatever you name it.
But we don't really have like any help on our side, on the human side,
because I wouldn't really call these cybersecurity solutions help on the client
side or the customer side.
Because they are more aware of fraud and maybe IP addresses that
you shouldn't visit, maybe anti-phishing, those
kind of things.
But none of these applications are actually protecting you from giving out
too much of yourself.
And the reason is that computers today simply don't know you.
Probably they know some things about your habits, some things about
your emails, maybe the content is giving you away.
But, generally, they don't know you.
So like you got a new phone, it will start asking you questions about sensitive stuff
and where are you located and what's your name
and all these kind of things.
But it wouldn't ask you about your profession or your family,
not like a friend or someone that you just know.
So that way, even if technology is available for better protection, software today
and phones don't know that much about you.
Now if you get all these things together at a company, a private company, if you combine
all that information, even metadata, so proud of not collecting the actual content, only
metadata.
That doesn't matter.
The reason that you in the middle of the night you made a
call to a penis enlargement center, that's pretty telling.
Yeah.
All right.
So they know a lot about you.
And just by collecting all that information, they
can kind of outline your profile.
Or worse, they can tell who you are going to vote for.
And if you look around, there are emerging number
of companies who are actually doing that kind of profiling for you or for politicians.
And this is where things are getting tricky, I guess, because I think a politician today,
if you really want to get good votes and if you want
to win the election, you better turn to the social media.
You better turn to companies that are collecting information.
And you better start profiling your voters, which is pretty
scary.
There was evidence that Trump, the Trump team, had done this.
They did some pretty clever stuff.
You know there's some big data analytics going on, some huge number
crunching, some profiling, multi messaging through different channels.
So they've changed the face of politics, now.
Are we OK with this?
That's the question.
Are we OK with this?
Because you know what--
Well, you see, individually you think you are, because you are being fed the message
you want to hear.
But collectively as a society, realize that you voted for that person for this
and that person voted for that And there two almost opposing things, but you got different
messaging.
Yeah, but who's going to speak for society?
Right?
Well maybe that doesn't exist anymore.
Yeah, probably.
As privacy is fading, too.
Yeah.
Because if society was the collective and now you not because you're profiling,
everything comes down to micro-groups.
Exactly.
Different micro-groups.
And at the same time, you belong to this group and
that group and the other group too.
And that's why I think all the emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence, makes
the whole thing really scary.
Because with artificial intelligence, you would give that power over
to humans-- over to machines instead of humans.
Now humans can decide what to do with the data.
Right?
Whether they're going to feed you with extra information and use
whatever you need that you would like to consume.
But with artificial intelligence, you are simply giving that thing away.
And it's going to be a decision of a machine in the future.
That's why Stephen Hawking says that in the future,
like maybe 100 years from now, everything is going to be controlled by machines.
So what we need to make sure is that machines believe
in the same things as humans, if we just simply want to stay there a little bit longer.
Is that not a naive human belief that machines will believe in the same things?
A, they don't believe, and, B, they don't act with
the same emotional drivers, of course, psychology of humans that are so different.
Well, you can argue that they can be reprogrammed to do that.
But the question is whether they want to use that or not.
And also, I don't believe that that is the way things work, because there is an arbitrage.
So if you know if some person is programming machines that try and make emotional
decisions like humans, somebody else is going to do the opposite because there's is a bit
of business opportunity doing that.
Absolutely.
You're absolutely right.
The question here, I think, is when we build machines, what are we building them for?
Even now, today, we got a lot of machines that
are stronger than us.
That's why we can make buildings like this, right?
But we are never really giving the control over.
You never get rid of that part of a story.
So the equation always has at least one human decision in it.
That's why these artificial intelligence controlled weapons, and all the
other things that an artificial intelligence do is
really scary and scares people.
And to be honest, even great thinkers, businessmen, they
don't have the idea what's going to happen.
They don't know.
Elon Musk is saying that the doomsday is coming.
Like we are summoning the demon.
And I think that's what he likes to say.
While, Mark Zuckerberg says that, hey, people there's
no problem here.
We are going to have a lot of fun.
It's convenient and you know it's comfortable.
And yeah, we will just walk around the beach and our kids are being taken
care of by machines and that's fine.
So, you never know.
You never know what's going to happen.
And especially in cybersecurity, which is my field, this is the kind of thing that we
cannot avoid using because we've got a lot of data.
In 2020, there will be 44 zettabytes of information circling around the internet.
Right?
It's an immense number.
And the next one-- How many zeroes is a zettabyte.
It's like-- I don't know.
I don't even know.
It wouldn't fit on your screen for sure.
And the next one is yottabyte.
And then we're done.
You know, that's the max we can have in SI unit system.
So we need to come up with new ones, right?
I think they were introduced in 1991.
So they are fairly new additions to the whole system.
So the other thing is that-- you can check it on YouTube-- that Anonymous group, recently,
exfiltrated 55 million voters' data from the Philippine's election system in two minutes.
Two minutes.
It's 80 something gigabytes of data, under two minutes.
So we got like 44 zettabytes, two minutes hack stunts.
A lot of information just circling around.
And for that to analyze, we need better infrastructures.
We need artificial intelligence and machine learning.
So is this an arms race against the machines themselves?
That's true in one way.
And on the other hand, hackers are going to use machines,
too.
Now they're still relying on their instincts, because it works.
The top 10 vulnerabilities in most systems are still SQL injections.
And, you know, they have been around for the last
10 years.
But I think in the future, they will use machines against machines.
Which is funny because will we be just staying there looking
at machines fighting with each other over our
data?
And at the same time, another thing is that we would not understand what they're doing.
I just heard recently that a hedge fund came up with the idea, and they also developed.
that, an AI that would do trading.
And they had to shut it down because it was producing
money, but they didn't understand how.
Because it was using the kind of algorithms nobody
actually programmed into the machine.
That's why it's an artificial intelligence and not just
learning.
So nobody understood it.
And it was scary.
The way the guy put it, I think, it was that you felt like you had to wash your hands
every time you touch that machine, you know.
It's interesting, but I think it's something we can't avoid, because it feels comfortable.
It feels convenient that machines are doing this stuff
for us.
But at the same time, we are giving more and more control out.
And eventually, probably, we'll lose the battle, I don't know,
or the war.
So all I'm thinking about when I listen to this, when you think about enormous war, of
which there's going to be multiple attempts at solutions, I just think there's trillions
of dollars that has to flow into this, the whole cybersecurity
industry.
And the artificial intelligence industry.
And the artificial intelligence.
And if there's the next phase of where Silicon Valley goes
and the developments within Russia and China, this whole thing is almost another huge
phase to come of development that's going to suck capital in all around the world.
I mean we're seeing it, you see the essence of it
for, example, in blockchains technologies.
People are starting to throw money into it and become
exciting.
Everyone knows is coming.
When it comes, it's going to be huge.
Exactly.
And there's another there's another thing here, transhumanism.
It's been around from the '50s or '60s, I think.
It's a movement that believes that we should fuse with machines instead of waging war against
machines.
By fusing machines, I mean that machines do a lot of things better--
pattern recognition, remembering things, learning things faster, doing things faster.
They are never tired.
They don't want to go to vacation, right?
That's why a lot of decision makers in the financials where think that probably it
would be a good idea to pay taxes for robots, right?
So if you're like using robots to manufacture stuff, somebody needs to pay for
that people staying home.
So, anyway, coming back to transhumanism, I think it's a pretty good idea.
I mean whatever we have and is good in humans, we can kind
of put that into a machine.
And maybe together, we can have a more efficient life.
And maybe that would just solve the problem of whether machines are going to be taking
over or not, because we will be we one race.
I know it's a very-- it's not really a humanist idea.
I understand that.
No, but it maybe a realist idea.
Yeah.
It's about, let's say, it's about survival, I think, and wise decisions.
And so if we're talking about the accelerated phase of AI, because it solves many
problems and may create its own issues in its own way.
But it solves many problems right now that we need to solve, whether it's in
the cybersecurity world or whether it's in a
number of different issues.
How far are we away from the accelerated part of the AI curve
where suddenly everybody cracks AI and things are learning fast and we're making
quantum leaps?
It's exponential.
And people are very bad in sensing exponentially.
You know they are just simply very-- we are linear.
Yeah.
We're very linear.
So I believe that in the next few years, we are going to see a lot of changes in that
field.
I think more and more money is going to flow into Artificial Intelligence development
in every field, because it's very interesting.
It's exciting, really exciting, what machines can
do.
And then I think about, let's say, five years from now, I think we will get to a point
where we will have to make serious decisions.
We're going to be there facing dilemmas, the kind of dilemmas we have never seen before.
And the biggest problem will be that if we use machines, if we give them the right to
decide for us, we can achieve more.
Or let's just stop here and don't evolve or don't, let's say,
you know go further.
And I think humanity, in those situations, never stop, never ever.
Yeah.
Interesting.
And this is the kind of thing we have never faced before.
With AI, I think we are actually creating a new race, something,
a machine, something.
It's probably-- yeah, it's a machine you know as a mechanism.
But the way it thinks, the way it communicates, will be completely new to us.
Facebook and Google they made those experiments and it turned out that if you
let machines work out their own communication, they start inventing new things, maybe a new
language.
So they had to shut them down because they didn't understand them what they
were talking about.
So with this, I think we're going to create something.
It's going to be strong, equally strong, or even stronger than us.
And that's a new situation.
We have never faced that before.
And it's not just stronger, but different.
It's not like a monkey or a dog, because that's coming from the same roots.
It's kind of like biological heritage.
So we know how to handle that.
But with this thing, we don't know.
And that's the interesting part.
And I think we'll have-- we got the time to work that out.
But it requires a lot more attention.
Today, everybody's focusing on how to make more money with computers and computing
capacity and artificial intelligence and how to replace like costly people with robots
and everything.
And probably in the UK.
Throughout the next few years, there will be probably
a million jobs will be replaced by AI in the government sector.
And that's a big deal.
But I think there's another thing we need to think about.
And it's the financial model.
For the times when machines will be doing the
work and not us.
We don't have a model for that.
You have to have a smaller population.
OK.
And how would you solve that?
Well it's already happening, right?
As technologies gone and longevity of life is
occurring, people stop having kids.
Population of the world's going to shrink dramatically
starting in the Western world.
You know whether it's in Hungary, whether it's in
Switzerland, or whether it's in Germany or the US or the UK, they're all going to shrink.
And by the time India peaks out, then Asia's shrinking and will do for probably 100 years.
We will see that.
I think it makes sense if you don't need people, why make them?
Just make machines instead.
So you see machines, or-- whatever for want of a better word-- technology as an evolution
of human beings.
I don't know.
But usually every time they ask me this question, I say that I'm with the
machines.
I think it's going to be good later that I've said that now.
They'll spare your life.
Arthur, thank you very much.
That was fascinating.
Thank you very much.
I think it's a really, really interesting and scary thing, but exciting, too.
Yeah.
We don't know what the world leads to.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, that was remarkable.
There's so much to take in.
And that was just scratching the surface of what is a huge deal.
And some of the concepts Arthur was talking about-- transhumanization, how man and machines
fit together, the future of artificial intelligence, the war that we have to fight,
the ongoing war, how much of our data we have lost, some of the solutions that may
or may not be present.
I mean Arthur is pretty clear that he has no idea where this is going.
But it is going somewhere and it is a very, very different world than the one we live
in.
Elon Musk thinks one thing.
Mark Zuckerberg thinks another.
And they're probably both wrong.
All we do know is that is going to be different.
But what I know-- if I want to relate it back to the investment world-- is there is billions
and billions and billions of dollars, if not trillions,
coming into this space, both in cybersecurity to protect profits.
It becomes the insurance industry of choice.
I think that's fascinating.
In addition, I think the scaling up of the artificial intelligence arms race is going
to be the source of one of the next trillion dollar
companies or maybe even the first trillion dollar
company.
That whole investment area is, I think, a long-term, multi-decade thing that is only
just started.
We have no idea where it's going to go.
But we do know that it is the future of everything.
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