AI in Cybersecurity colloquium hosted by Arizona State University, Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society 17/18 Feb. 2021
Expanded outline of my talk for the colloquium.
0) The distinction between a posteriori and a priori
knowledge: A posteriori knowledge is so-called
'evidence-based' knowing that is based on empirical knowledge
after the
facts, and thus, in an important sense, comes too late.
A priori knowledge, by contrast, is knowledge of the elementary
phenomena before the factual events of empirical
experience. It concerns how empirical facts are already
cast or framed prior to particular experience of them. A priori knowledge thus frames in advance our access to the world, i.e. how we interpret the most elementary phenomena in our age. It therefore enables insights that an empiricist mind-set, arriving after the event, cannot.
1) The
bigger picture on cybersecurity from a philosophical, i.e. a priori, pre-empirical, perspective: We
live in the age of progressive algorithmization of the world that thus increasingly becomes the cyberworld steered by
bit-strings. Algorithms
outsource a segment of our understanding of
some movement or other to the cyberworld
with the aim of automatically controlling,
mastering it. Bit-strings are the denizens
of the cyberworld that are in constant interplay
with one another, algorithms
being the bit-strings that copulate with data bit-strings (in trillions of Universal Turing
Machines) to
compute progeny bit-strings that control movement/change of
some kind, either within the cyberworld itself, where the
bit-strings circulate, or in the physical
world. UTMs therefore are conceived
within the venerable paradigm of efficient,
productive movement — everything under control! This conception is pre-empirical, and no one will ever be able go out into the cyber-network and establish the empirical existence of UTMs. Nevertheless, the cyberworld is inhabited by bit-strings in unceasing algorithmic copulation.
2) Any
algorithmic bit-string in a UTM, however, can be infiltrated
by a virus bit-string to alter how the movement
is controlled, thus subverting the paradigm of
efficient, productive movement.
Hence what was conceived as the unambiguous,
dead-certain, automated control of movement via
bit-string code is subverted into an ambiguous, uncertain
interplay among many players injecting bits of digital code
into the cyberworld. The uncontrollable interplay
with which cybersecurity is concerned can be
characterized as
algorithmic bit-strings in antagonistic
interplay (or even at war) with
one another in order to usurp control over movement
to the detriment of the opposing player, i.e.
the adversary, who may be a state, a government agency, a company, an
institution or an individual. The automated, algorithmic outsourcing of our understanding and control of movements in the world to the cyberworld that also enables the viral infection of bit-strings is a momentous, unparalleled world-historical event, by subverting, once and for all, the venerable paradigm of efficient, productive movement that is the hallmark of all Western science: automated movement controlled by a single source can now be countermanded and outsmarted by another, adversarial, automated source. If all movement in the
social world is power-interplay that
requires mutual estimation (in the
twofold, both appreciative and depreciative,
sense) to negotiate it successfully, the cyberworld of bit-strings now enables this ubiquitous power-interplay to be outsourced and thus played out also via certain things called bit-strings. Our human conflicts can now be fought out, and even automated, via bit-string surrogates.
3) Moreover, the cyberworld movement intermeshes
with the augmentative movement of
thingified value (roughly: anything that has a
price) through whose medium, in the first place,
economic interplay is played out globally today in the
gainful game in which we are all
players and have stakes, above all as income-earners of all
kinds, starting with wage-earners. The value-form transformations that thingified
value has to pass through in order to augment are
facilitated by
algorithmic steering in the cyberworld, e.g.
supply-chain management, logistics, accounting, market
information, etc. Such algorithmic control, however,
cannot guarantee that the gainful game runs smoothly
and surely, augmenting thingified value in its circular movement.
On the contrary, the gainful game interplay is
itself inherently uncertain since the value-form transformations themselves depend on an inherently uncertain, transactional interplay.
4)
Thingified value in itself also has a social power over
movement that goes beyond the global economic interplay.
It exerts its power, in particular, in politics
(lobbying, political donations, etc.) and is the medium also for cyber-criminality
whose villainous business model employs viral
bit-strings to defraud and extort thingified
value from victims, including state agencies, public
utilities, public health institutions as well as
private persons and entities. Hence the current
increasing concern over cyber-attacks and
cyber-vulnerabilities in an increasingly algorithmically steered world.
5) But even apart from the dangers of cyber-attacks
and illicit cyber-interplay, even in 'legitimate'
interplay that is not subverted by viral bit-strings, we are all captive to thingified value
as the medium of our sociation with
one another, and we are becoming increasingly
controlled in our life-movements of every kind by
what the algorithms, intermeshed with the turnover
of thingified value, dictate what we can and cannot
do. All the more reason for learning to see i) through the fetishizing veil of thingification and ii) the ambiguous, power-interplay nature of algorithmic control over movement.
Further reading: 'Turing's
cyberworld of timelessly copulating bit-strings'
Movement
and Time in the Cyberworld
and Social Ontology of Whoness.
