Our digital world needs a human back up more than ever

digital
Image credit: fongbeerredhot | shutterstock.com

As we hurtle into our inevitable digital future, the flaws and risks of doing so become more apparent every day.

For people besieged by protesters in an airport, as Tony Poulos was recently, there should be a plan, based on common sense, that allows those people access to essential comforts (let them into Departures). There should be, perhaps, a switch that says ‘anyone with a Boarding Pass to anywhere should get into Departures’. There will be those who know about these things who will say ‘Ah, but’ a lot but there should be something in place.

The same happened at London’s Gatwick airport earlier this year when drones shut the airport for 24 hours (a couple of hunters with shotguns would have happily paid to solve the problem).

Recently, again in the UK, two power stations went down at the same time. One old coal one and one new wind powered one. Millions of people were affected, businesses stopped and trains could not run.

This is happening all over the world, every day. We don’t hear about it because we live in one place and our news is filtered by how close the disaster/outage is to our location.

Go even more digital and the news is equally, if not more, frightening.

A consultancy recently found 34 million vulnerabilities across AWS, Azure and GCP. A firm that supplies secure firewalls was breached. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have had their data stolen, normally without being aware of it.

Because cybersecurity is now firmly in the centre of national security, more billions of dollars are being spent on its development – for good and evil – than ever before.

Increasingly AI, not common sense, will control our world. The digital is replacing the real world and because of this and the speed with which it is happening we are simply unable to keep up or keep control.

Fake news, fake reviews and fake anything is now the norm. Social media cannot cope or filter it all, however much progress they report. You don’t have to go to special sites, let alone the dark web to find unsafe and unpleasant things. Recently a team found thousands of unsafe products on Amazon. Products that would never have been allowed to be sold in the US are one click away.

Google recently exposed a massive iPhone hacking operation. And Apple are meant to be the best, right?

Across the spectrum our digital world is proving to be more and more dangerous and out of control place.

We need a human back up before it gets beyond us.

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