I recently returned from the inaugural ISACA Conference North America: Digital Trust World in Boston, Massachusetts. It was three days jam-packed with riveting keynotes, inspiring speakers and boisterous parties. Three days full of invaluable learning, personal growth and deep conversations. Three days of building brand new friendships, professional connections and meaningful relationships.
I caught myself in jaw-dropped disbelief at the brilliance and quality of it all on more than one occasion. ISACA’s Digital Trust World was by far THE MOST well-planned and well-executed professional conference that I have ever been to in my 20-year technology career.
And it’s not even close.
What other conference has over 100 speakers in attendance, including a former FBI agent, a 19-year-old prodigy and college professor, a famous Big Tech whistleblower, published authors and thought leaders, and CISOs from some of the biggest and most influential technology companies in the world?
What other conference has characters dressed as the Founding Fathers, Cirque du Soleil-type dancers, a person walking on stilts, a techno-mixing DJ and an official event photographer?
What other conference has free professional headshots, vendors giving away US$1,000 cash, an air hockey table, free swag, and catered meals and drinks?
You might be thinking at this point – that’s not a security conference, Naomi. That’s a party.
But that’s the beauty of it, dear reader. Somehow, ISACA was able to brilliantly balance the gravity of a security conference with the soul-lifting levity of a fun-filled party. And honestly? It couldn’t have come at a better time, what with layoffs devastating the tech industry, us surviving a vicious pandemic, and watching our everyday costs of living increase to staggering heights in a struggling economy.
We – the security industry – needed this. Heck, we deserved this.
And if you were there, you know what I’m talking about.
Artificial Intelligence & The Future of Cybersecurity
But what did I actually learn at the conference? What were my key takeaways? Surely it wasn’t all just glitz and glam, parties, and lobster rolls.
And you’d be right about that.
Did you know that ChatGPT and all other “Artificial Intelligence,” for that matter – is just statistics on steroids? That friendly chatbot that you use every day is just a mathematical model for prediction, albeit a convincingly real one. I certainly didn’t know that fact before last week. I just thought “AI” was this magical thing that could actually THINK based on the data it’s been trained on. But I know better now.
The current generation of AI is not actually intelligent at all. There is no thinking, at least in the sense that we humans understand “thinking” to be. Tools like ChatGPT simply predict. They predict words and numbers, bits and bytes. They predict the most probable “next” word to create a sentence, the “next” pixel to create a picture, the “next” note to create a song.
And while the text, pictures and songs that AI creates might make sense to the uninformed, you know that, upon closer inspection, these creations sometimes don’t make any sense at all.
You’ve seen this in action. How many times has ChatGPT spit out an incredibly “real” looking blob of text, only for it to be full of logical fallacies and head-scratching inaccuracies? Anyone with a decent level of knowledge of the material can easily pick out the errors and mistakes made by AI, sometimes to hilarious consequences.
I once asked ChatGPT to calculate the number of popcorn kernels in a 1,000-millileter glass flask (I was trying to win a contest, you see). It hilariously answered 3.5 million. Three point five million kernels of popcorn in a thousand milliliter flask. The actual answer was around 2,300 kernels of popcorn.
What’s my point? Well, for one thing, don’t use ChatGPT to try to win counting or guessing contests. It won’t help you.
Secondly, ChatGPT – and other artificial intelligence tools, for that matter – won’t be replacing human intelligence any time soon. There’s just this huge hurdle that must first be overcome before AI replaces jobs and tasks that require uniquely human traits like creativity, critical thinking, judgment and ethical decision-making.
And honestly? That’s a huge relief.
There’s just a tad bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt going around the water cooler these days about “scary” AI replacing our jobs, am I right? Hushed conversations in boardrooms around the world. Pundits calling out the “evils” of AI on the nightly news. Even governments getting deeply engaged in the conversation.
I’m going to put a stake in the ground and say this: thanks to what I learned at ISACA Digital Trust World, there isn’t much we need to fear from AI right now. It’s just not ready to replace real human intelligence at a level that makes sense for businesses and organizations. Businesses and organizations, after all, are run by (and are a service to) humans. You just can’t replace people with unthinking, unfeeling technology – at least not overnight.
But we can still use tools like ChatGPT to help us in our jobs and in our lives, absolutely. The average person is already using AI. But the truly intelligent person is using AI along with a healthy dose of skepticism and care. He or she doesn’t just copy and paste from ChatGPT into an email or document. The intelligent person uses their experience and judgment, along with ChatGPT, to enhance that email or document. After all, ChatGPT – and other AI tools – are just that. Tools.
Final Thoughts
Now that I’ve had a few days to decompress from the conference, I’m left with an overwhelming sense of anticipation. What’s next for the cybersecurity industry? What’s on the horizon for technology? What can I expect the world to look like in five, 10, 20 years? And most importantly, what does that mean for my career?
Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I had answers to these questions.
But I’m certainly able to sleep at night, knowing that the future of the cybersecurity industry is secure, simply because the future of computing technology is so undecided. There is so much uncertainty with what’s to come.
And after all, who better to deal with uncertainty than security professionals?
Editor’s note: Did you miss ISACA Conference North America: Digital Trust World Boston? No worries – find out about our upcoming ISACA Conference Virtual: Digital Trust World (21-22 June) and ISACA Conference Europe: Digital Trust World Dublin (17-19 October) events.