2 min read

Science Fiction to Reality

Science Fiction to Reality
Photo by Alek Kalinowski / Unsplash

I love sci-fi and action movies. One of my favourite Sci-fi movie is the ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy. The best part of sci-fi movies is that what is a fiction today, can become a reality tomorrow. I still wish to own the DeLorean from Back to the Futures, but I don’t think that will become a reality during my lifetime, but who knows.

The purpose of this article is not to discuss my taste of movies, but to look at the two events happened in the recent past, which till now were sci-fi movie stories.

The first one taking down of Ukraine’s power grid by Russian hackers. You will question me how it’s related to a movie? Die Hard series, another of my favourite movie series, particularly ‘Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard’, as the movie revolves around a hacker who brings the entire nation to a standstill only through technology. One of the concept in the movie was ‘Fire Sale’.

What is a Fire Sale? A Fire Sale is an all-out cyber warfare attack that performs a three-stage systematic attack on a nation’s computer infrastructure. Hackers called it a Fire Sale because “Everything must go”.

Three Stages of a Fire Sale
Stage 1: Shutting down all transportation systems; such as traffic lights, railroad lines, subway system and airport systems.
Stage 2: Disable the financial systems; including Wall Street, banks and financial records.
Stage 3: Turning off public utility systems, such as electricity, gas lines, telecommunications and satellite systems.

We saw the San Francisco’s public transportation system getting hacked, last November (SF’s Transit Hack could’ve Been Way Worse – and Cities Must Prepare). Mt. Gox one of the largest bitcoin stock exchange was hacked in 2014, which ultimately led it to file for bankruptcy (The inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin’s $460 Million Disaster). And the take-down of Ukraine’s power grid (How an Entire Nation Became Russia’s Test Lab for Cyberwar). These all are isolated attacks currently, but looking at all these incidents and current cyber warfare landscape, the question isn’t If, but When a full-scale Fire Sale would happen. And I don’t think that day is too far.

Another event which made me mull over the rate at which technology is growing and where it’s taking us was the Facebook shutting down some of its chatbots as they developed their own language to communicate. No, the Facebook’s bots are not taking over the world, it was just an experiment where bots had to divide things like balls, hats and books between them, and they started using their own language for successful divisions rather than human recognizable sentences. But this incident led me thinking whether an AI system like ‘Skynet’ from Terminator series can be a reality in future, which decides whether humans should live or not.

We all know the difference of opinion on the subject of AI between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The computing power today is growing exponentially and after looking at the Google’s AlphaGo and its ability to defeat all human opponents many years faster than most expert observers predicted. I support the Musk’s view of having regulations for AI development before it’s too late.

I don’t think the Judgement Day is near, but we can never know for sure when the real Skynet goes live.

What’s your view on the current cyber threat landscape and the future of AI?