When Fiction is Relevant to Tech

Given the future we are headed towards with its AI, self-driven cars and drones (and who knows what other forms of “smart” software”?), governments world over worry about security implications. And yes, governments can look outside the bureaucratic box, as seen in Bruce Schneier’s description of one such US initiative a decade back:

“The Department of Homeland Security hired a bunch of science fiction writers to come in for a day and think of ways terrorists could attack America. If our inability to prevent 9/11 marked a failure of imagination, as some said at the time, then who better than science fiction writers to inject a little imagination into counterterrorism planning?”

Schneier though sees a problem with consulting sci-fi writers:

“More imagination leads to more movie-plot threats -- which contributes to overall fear and overestimation of the risks. And that doesn't help keep us safe at all.”

Rather, he prefers this model:

“Science fiction writers are creative, and creativity helps in any future scenario brainstorming. But please, keep the people who actually know science and technology in charge.”

Schneier has a point: the most easily imagined threat do tend to take over public imagination in disproportionate amounts. On the other hand, the “modern hex” blog I wrote describes a scenario that sounded all too possible in the future. And that was from a sci-fi book.

And sometimes, unlike the “modern hex”, the attack doesn’t involve hacking an existing system. It just involves feeding wrong information to the sensors of the system, as this scary attack on driverless cars already shows:

“Attackers successfully attack a driverless car system -- Renault Captur's "Level 0" autopilot (Level 0 systems advise human drivers but do not directly operate cars) -- by following them with drones that project images of fake road signs in 100ms bursts. The time is too short for human perception, but long enough to fool the autopilot's sensors.”

Garbage in, garbage out. Or in this case, garbage in, coffins out.

Or perhaps we’ve already doomed ourselves to the next level of cat-and-mouse warfare where it’s not humans v machines, but machines v machines, as Max Tegmark writes in Life 3.0:

“Better AI systems can also be used to find new vulnerabilities and perform more sophisticated hacks.”

Maybe fiction is relevant to tech. After all, doesn’t all this sound like the scientific version of the Red Queen Effect, from Through the Looking Glass?

“‘‘Now, here, you see”, (said the Red Queen), “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’”