We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.
Interpretation
We often fear catastrophic cyber attacks while neglecting the dangers of data manipulation that can undermine trust in important systems.
David E. Sanger's quote emphasizes that while society is preoccupied with the potential for large-scale cyber attacks, such as a severe disruption of critical infrastructure, we are overlooking the more insidious risks posed by the manipulation of data. This manipulation can have far-reaching implications, affecting elections, medical records, and the operation of autonomous technologies, thus highlighting the urgent need to address not only brute force attacks but also the integrity of the data that underpins our digital world.
In practice
During a cybersecurity conference, this quote can highlight the overlooked risks of data integrity.
Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.
As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially.
Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.
Space tourism is a logical outgrowth of the adventure tourist market.
YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect.
The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?
When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.
I don't know whether computers are improving the style of play, I know they are changing it. Chess has become a different game, one could say that computers have changed the world of chess. That is pretty clear.
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