"When asked directly about the most pressing digital threats, be it AI misuse or quantum computing, Schneier quipped. "I generally hate ranking threats, but if I had to pick candidates for 'biggest,' it would be one of these: income inequality, late-stage capitalism, or climate change," he wrote. "Compared to those, cybersecurity is a rounding error."
(...)
Asked directly about NSA reforms post-Snowden, Schneier was skeptical, responding: "Well, they haven't had any leaks of any magnitude since then, so hopefully they did learn something about OPSEC. But near as we can tell, nothing substantive has been reformed."
Schneier further clarified, "We should assume that the NSA has developed far more extensive surveillance technology since then," stressing the importance of vigilance.
He touched on the fusion of AI and democracy - a theme of his upcoming book Rewiring Democracy - noting that he didn't "think that AI as a technology will change how different types of government will operate. It's more that different types of governments will shape AI."
He is pessimistic that countries will harness AI's power to do good and help improving quality of life.
"It would be fantastic if governments prioritized these things," he said. "[This] seems unrealistic in a world where countries are imagining some sort of AI 'arms race' and where monopolistic corporations are controlling the technologies. To me, that speaks to the solutions: international cooperation and breaking the tech monopolies. And, yes, those are two things that are not going to happen.""
https://www.scworld.com/news/bruce-schneier-ai-hype-nsa-surveillance-and-cybersecuritys-real-challenges
#CyberSecurity #NSA #Surveillance #AI #AISafety #QuantumComputing #Cryptography #Encryption
"The company, in other words, is "careless." Warned of imminent harms to its users, to democracy, to its own employees, the top executives simply do not care. They ignore the warnings and the consequences, or pay lip service to them. They don't care.
(...)
But there's another meaning to "careless" that lurks just below the surface of this excellent memoir: "careless" in the sense of "arrogant" – in the sense of not caring about the consequences of their actions.
To me, this was the most important – but least-developed – lesson of Careless People. When Wynn-Williams lands at Facebook, she finds herself surrounded by oafs and sociopaths, cartoonishly selfish and shitty people, who, nevertheless, have built a service that she loves and values, along with hundreds of millions of other people.
She's not wrong to be excited about Facebook, or its potential. The company may be run by careless people, but they are still prudent, behaving as though the consequences of screwing up matter."