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Is technological progress doomed to serving
the needs of the darkest human corners?
Aug 22, 2015 | 2,781 views this week
The point of view of "The Economist"
In its “From horseless to driverless” article the pollution, space and safety advantages are
lengthly exposed – including the business opportunities for “driverless car fleet owners”.
An interesting ethical question is presented: who should have the choice of “minimizing
injuries to their own passengers” vs “minimizing arm overall”.
In this essay, I will try to focus on an entirely new class of systemic risks caused by these
emerging "connected" or "smart" industries (transportation, health, energy, etc.), and think
about what could constitute a viable solution for all players: regulators, vendors and users.
Remote Individuals at the Wheel
Plenty of reports indicate that today's cars (all recently manufactured cars are "connected")
Connected and driverless cars provide endless “management” opportunities for creative
people so this is only a matter of time before we see this happening.
Let's quote The Economist again, in its "The Internet of things (to be hacked)" article:
"To avoid lurid headlines about car crashing, insulin overdoses and houses burning, tech
firms will surely have to embrace higher [security] standards."
Is technological progress doomed to serving the
needs of the darkest human corners?
Once these capabilities in the hands of a few “Masters of the Universe”, what can be done
to detect (and prevent) such abuses from happening is not clear for most of us.
But an overwhelming majority of people will start to care when their neighbors will go
away in dust and flames.
Restoring the Trust
A few months after The Economist's alarming article, Academic Research (in Europe,
Commonwealth, and Asia) dedicated millions of euros of public funding to focus on “post-
quantum” encryption:
“Post-quantum cryptography for long-term security“ (reference: 645622)
Online banking, e-commerce, telemedicine, mobile communication, and cloudcomputing depend fundamentally on the security of the underlyingcryptographic algorithms. These systems are all broken as soon as largequantum computers are built. The EU and governments around the world areinvesting heavily in building quantum computers; society needs to beprepared for the consequences, including cryptanalytic attacksaccelerated by these computers. Long-term confidential documents such aspatient health-care records and state secrets have to guarantee securityfor many years, but information encrypted with today's standards andstored until quantum computers are available will then be as easy todecipher as Enigma-encrypted messages are today.
The challenge is to find solutions guaranteeing end-to-end securityregardless of improvements in attacker hardware or computationalcapabilities.