Zombie Cloud
ZOMBIE CLOUD
Mikhail Minkovsky, Vice President of New Technologies for Sitronics, presented a scary view of the nearest future, where someone may know everything about you and control your household appliances and gadgets.
The world of technology is bubbling over with events which could cause conspiracy theorists to get a fit of severe paranoia. See for yourself. iCloud, remote repository where Apple device users can store the back-up copies of all of their data, has been launched, and as a result, the number of subscribers for data storage cloud services increased by tens of millions instantaneously. Some high-quality cloud-based speech recognition systems (Siri, Google) have been released, and thanks to them, mobile phones are now able to recognise voice requests and perform functions "on command", that used to be triggered by pressing buttons. Canadian D-Wave Systems sold their first off-the-shelf quantum computer which is perfect for building artificial intelligence, among other things. It has been announced on both sides of the ocean that an exaflop supercomputer, which is able to easily break a cipher no matter how complex it is, will become a reality in 2020.
Major airline groups argue about nuances in the application of the increasingly popular fly-by-wire concept which implies that control of the aircraft should be fully or partially entrusted to the computer. More and more 'intelligent house' applications are emerging on the market. Cars are now able to park themselves. In the US, the first instance of schizophrenia to strike a neural network has been recorded. Ralph Hoffman from the Yale University and Risto Miikkulainen from the University of Texas fed a computer various stories and had it memorise them faster than normally. Eventually, the computer imagined that it itself took part in the events described in the stories and, inserting itself into a third-person story, claimed itself to be the terrorist who had planted a bomb.
Historically, technical novelties have always produced a certain impact on those prone to paranoia, similarly to adrenaline release. But nowadays, this rush has reached an unprecedented scale. To unravel the underlying causes, I suggest we put a couple of modern trends into words. I named the first one the "by-wire life". Let us start with the aviation industry. All control systems available to the pilot were once mechanically connected directly to the aircraft's control surfaces. With time, intermediary mechanisms were introduced between the pilot and aircraft systems to boost mechanical and hydraulic gears. However, all of them served the sole purpose of transferring the pilot's action to an aircraft's system as quickly and precisely as possible, without "ad-libbing". In the past decades, electronic devices have come to the aid of pilots, and thus fly-by-wire digital technology was born. When flying the most state-of-the-art aircraft equipped with FBW, the pilot does not have direct control of the aircraft's systems, he only gives instructions to the computer which translates its own (not human) commands to control surfaces and other systems over thousands of wires (that is why it's called 'by-wire').
It has unexpectedly turned out that it's not the pilot who controls the aircraft, but the computer, with the pilot in turn controlling the computer. Some may say that it doesn't matter because the result is the same. It actuality, it's not. The computer is able both to transfer the pilot's commands to the aircraft "as is", and to correct them if needed. This "free will" on the part of the computer is the subject of vigorous debate among airline groups. Europe, represented by Airbus, believes that the computer must have strict control over the pilot and block any potentially harmful actions, while America (Boeing) suggests that the control system should only warn the pilot of danger, but never modify or block his commands.
This debate is absolutely essential, because all recent major air disasters in the Russian Federation (and elsewhere) have been due to pilots' mistakes. Anyway, the Rubicon has already been crossed, and aircraft control systems have acquired a new fundamental feature: control via computer makes it actually possible to navigate the aircraft without pilot intervention. The aircraft is able to download and execute programs, which makes the issue of taking over control of the aircraft not theoretical ("possible or impossible") but rather technical ("how can it be done"). Of course, taking over control externally in situations such as a terrorist attack or pilots losing their ability to navigate the aircraft can save many lives. But at the same time that is associated with extreme danger, and I suppose that everyone understands why.
I've chosen to cite the aviation industry as an example because any air passenger would acutely feel potential danger. However, a concept similar to FBW has been already partly implemented in our immediate technogenic environment. Household appliances, be it a DVD player or an air conditioner, are controlled via an intermediary device, a digital controller which is a control computer per se. On-board computers in modern cars actively intervene in controls (stabilisation systems) and even assume total control (parking).
Controllers are currently being equipped with a fundamentally new feature which is the ability to communicate with the external world over a permanent channel. The 'intelligent house' is nothing more than an implementation of this concept. The goal is simple - all control computers will be networked to the Internet of Things. Networks such as the Internet of Things will become a standardised environment which will enable machine-to-machine (M2M) interaction as well as machine-to-human interaction, and this, in turn, will dramatically speed up the process of equipping things with networking abilities.
And with that, we back to the conspiracy theory. All or almost all devices are controlled via intermediary computers, which are not only getting more intelligent, but can also network with each other. And that is what actually may cause a fit of paranoia. Nothing can be trusted; any item that carries a chip can easily go out of control, whether of its own accord or at the command of conspirators! The refrigerator can cause milk to spoil, or the hob can release gas, or the washing machine can eject water when its door is open. The car can jump a red light, or the security system can deliberately fail to call the police when necessary. And unless there's a John Connor who is able to stop this rise of the machines, the lives of the paranoid will be in danger.
There's another trend in the increasing paranoia called "nothing is personal". The iCloud service has recently been launched, which offers Apple users the ability to back-up all information contained in their gadgets and place it in remote storage. As a matter of fact, for the first time in history, tens of millions of people voluntarily sent almost all their personal data to the common storage at the same time. Think of the opportunities that intelligence services are being offered! Just imagine the amount of information in relation to your habits, tastes, intentions, political views and consumer preferences, sexual orientation, financial position and taxes, friends and acquaintances, which a high-performance analytical system can fish out of your personal contacts and calendars, e-mails, personal photos, music and full back-up copies of your mobile phones and tablet PCs!
So, a gold mine of information has emerged, which is extremely attractive for those who are obsessed with the idea of total control. No matter how many laws to protect personal information have been and will be adopted, governments, intelligence services, major corporations and terrorists cannot but try to obtain full access to the content of such clouds. And as more information is accumulated in clouds, their eagerness to get their hands on it will increase exponentially.
Now let us analyse how the two described trends, "life-by-wire" and "nothing is personal", overlap. Due to the increasing connectivity within our technogenic environment, computer tasks can be solved outside the place where the results will be used. The NASA computer controls a probe near Jupiter. The Apple computer understands what you are saying to Siri and sends relevant instructions to your iPhone 4S. It is not only data, but also the processing of data that has been transferred to the cloud. Therefore, external inteference with data processing will be much easier. The only roadblock to gaining access to valuable information will be to hack the cloud.
So what will the world look like by the end of this decade? Almost any item will have an embedded controlling computer connected to the network to exchange data with the cloud. The cloud will store all of your personal data; all programs that you use in your day-to-day life, which can control your technogenic environment, will also be executed in the cloud. The cloud can be accessed by intelligence services, corporations, governments and, in the worst case, by terrorists or anybody with a high IQ, the necessary tools and social engineering skills. Moreover, those who will have access to the cloud, will also have an exaflop supercomputer at their disposal, which will be able to hack any data encrypting and encoding system in an almost real-time environment. They will also have a quantum computer able to solve certain classes of highly complex tasks in no time (within the fixed time irrespective of the task, to be exact). Let us not forget artificial intelligence systems, which could offer something fundamentally new if combined with contemporary computing features (think of the neurone network that suffers from schizophrenia). In the end, imagine a superbrain programmed by conspirators and suffering from schizophrenia, which knows everything about everyone and has access to the control of your coffee maker. Personally, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but before I leak all my personal information to my favourite vendor, I'll think twice. Because if due care is not taken, we may begin to be afraid of our own fridges in the nearest future.