Lesson #38- Fourth Industrial Revolution
Kris Durski
Hello, I would like to thank you for being with us. Your continued engagement is important to us. 👏🤟
Each industrial revolution was preceded by the discovery of a few things that had the potential to change the way we do things, communicate, or travel. Usually, with initial resistance to change, once people realize that those changes can benefit them, the revolution begins. So far, we have recorded four industrial revolutions, and we are in the midst of the fourth that began around 2000.
The First Industrial Revolution was taking place in the second half of the 18th Century (started around 1760) and its trigger was coal, which gave birth to the steam engine followed by machine work for manufacturing and transportation. Goods could be manufactured much faster and with much higher precision. Steam locomotives and steamships could move people and goods much faster, further, and at a much larger scale.
The Second Industrial Revolution occurred in the 70ties of the 19th Century (started around 1870) and its basis was the discovery of electricity and products of crude oil. The invention of an internal combustion engine led to mass transportation on the ground, water, and air. Chemistry gave birth to new materials primarily based on crude oil and coal. The invention of the telegraph and later the telephone introduced new ways people could communicate.
The Third Industrial Revolution took place in the late 20th Century (started around 1969) and was ushered into the world by electronics and nuclear energy. This gave birth to automation at virtually any level and anywhere. Computers started replacing human work as they could do things much faster, with much higher precision, and without getting tired. New ways of networking allowed for live communication and the exchange of data on an unprecedented scale. Jet and rocket engines ushered us into the world of not only faster transportation but also an exploration of outer space.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution started at the beginning of the 21st Century (started around 2000) and resulted from widespread connectivity and renewable energy. Thanks to cloud technology and the miniaturization of computing devices, the processing is no longer happening in one place, but can be distributed virtually over the entire world and beyond. The introduction of IoT (Internet of Things), connectivity, and cloud computing transforms the world into a blend of real and virtual (digital) matter, where things can act autonomously and replace people in many aspects of our lives.
Now, the question is whether humans can keep control of what is happening, or can machines escape from that control and destroy humanity? It all depends on how we, the people move forward from here.
Although AI (Artificial Intelligence) is far from human intelligence, it doesn’t mean that machines cannot control life events. We already know from the existing world that swarm intelligence far exceeds the intelligence of a single member of that group. Hence, brainstorming sessions of people, the smart behavior of groups of rats, the intelligence of a swarm of ants or bees, and many more. To change the behavior of a swarm, we have to influence some members of that swarm, kind of brainwash them. We can easily observe that activity in criminal gangs, lobbying of politicians or the public, or authoritarian systems.
To maintain control of machines and stay on top of life events, autonomous machines must act on behalf of people, or in other words, the machines must be authorized by people to perform certain things within given boundaries. By any means, machines should not be programmed to make autonomous decisions that go beyond those boundaries. For example, an industrial robot should be authorized by people to start manufacturing or to stop doing it, but the when or what must be part of human decision. The same, a car should be allowed to start or stop moving when its owner wishes to, and it should not be the decision of a computer controlling the car. One of the mistakes we already observe is allowing robots to shoot people and giving them the autonomy to do so.
Not only can things go out of control, but machines can be “brainwashed” by hackers who can intentionally authorize them to go beyond allowed boundaries. As we can see, authentication of those who are authorized to control the machine becomes even more important than login to a website of a bank, because the loss of lives cannot be compensated in the same way as the loss of money. The events during this industrial revolution and beyond will have to rely on the robust authentication of people more than ever before. Not only do hackers get smarter, but people have to interact with more and more machines, where authentication is not just important, but critical.
We already know that we cannot rely on people memorizing many passwords that are very difficult to guess, or password managers that facilitate technology where secrets are sent over the networks. Though password managers can generate very complex passwords, those passwords still travel the networks, so they are stealable and thus the authentication is still questionable. The use of biometric measurements is problematic in the same way. Either those measurements can be stolen, thus compromising the person for life, or they can be computer simulated. The way we look, our faces, our fingerprints, or our retina patterns are not purely random but written into our genes. With more and more knowledge about genes, the chances of simulation of parts of the human body become simpler each day.
Cryptography seems to be able to avoid those pitfalls, and even quantum computing is not expected to terminate it as a viable approach, but only make it stronger. In asymmetric cryptography, the private keys are not only hard to “guess”, but also the proof of their possession can be done without sharing them with others. If we can associate the private key with a person, the key can be used to prove the authenticity of that person, or in other words, authenticate the person without sharing a secret. It is important to understand that a private key is so complex that an average person cannot memorize it, not saying anything about memorizing more than one. To overcome this weakness of human beings, there are approaches where keys are embedded into hardware since computers have no problem with memorizing even very complex data. This is an almost perfect solution to keep keys away from prying eyes and still allow for the use of those keys.
However, relying on a device to prove the authenticity of a person based on the mere possession of that device seems to be quite a bit of a stretch. Not only can the device fail at the least expected moment, but it can also be forgotten, lost, or stolen. Also, devices from different manufacturers are usually not compatible in that aspect, so a person relying on several devices of different kinds is forced to have multiple identities for one site. This is even more troubling because if a person can create yet another identity for the same site, a fraudster can also do the same and then impersonate the authorized user. Make no mistake, possibilities always create opportunities for those who want to impersonate you to take advantage of the situation. It is good and secure to have a single identity but hidden that can be represented by an unlimited number of keys, though there should always be a single key per site.
The conclusion is simple; the device must be virtual, i.e., all digital, and be available on any physical device from anywhere and at any time, but available only to a specific person. The implications of that approach are obvious. Any failure of a physical device does not make a person stranded in the virtual or real world. There is only a single identity per site, so cloning of the identity is not facilitated by the mere virtue of an approach. And last but not least, if a key is compromised, it can be replaced by a new one, unlike a biometric feature.
Vaulter App SHARE:
That’s all folks for today. See you next Sunday! 👋.