InvestAI etc. - 7/23/2024
InvestAI etc. - 7/23/2024
AI for investors, explained in simple terms. An open thread updated weekly.
Topics discussed this week:
The CrowdStrike incident and the risk of AI overregulation
The rise of the “tech right”
CrowdStrike stock spiral
The LIST updated
AI links to consider
The CrowdStrike incident and the risk of AI overregulation
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SAMI >
The CrowdStrike incident of last Friday is a reminder of our dependence on computers. For readers who are not up to date, here is a quick comment from a computer science expert:
The global information technology outage on July 19, 2024, that paralyzed organizations ranging from airlines to hospitals and even the delivery of uniforms for the Olympic Games represents a growing concern for cybersecurity professionals, businesses and governments.
The outage is emblematic of the way organizational networks, cloud computing services and the internet are interdependent, and the vulnerabilities this creates. In this case, a faulty automatic update to the widely used Falcon cybersecurity software from CrowdStrike caused PCs running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. Unfortunately, many servers and PCs need to be fixed manually, and many of the affected organizations have thousands of them spread around the world.
It doesn’t sound like this will be a quick fix. But there are questions that we have to ask, looking at the event from the perspective of AI. Is it a taste of things to come? Could the havoc wreaked on airlines and other sectors potentially be even worse in a future world where we have handed over more functions to autonomous robots? And what if some of these robots have gone rogue and slipped out of human control? What do you think?
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RICHARD >
That’s a lot to consider. We should assume that similar incidents will occur again and that some will be even larger. We will not be able to completely control for that. But let’s focus on the bigger risk of robots going rogue. That is the claim—that robots will overtake us and do whatever they want, including some harmful things.