[ed. Fascinating speech about where we might go as a society: technologically, economically, socially and culturally. Along with great historical insights.]
by Charlie Stross
Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security.by Charlie Stross
Unlike you, I am not a security professional. However, we probably share a common human trait, namely that none of us enjoy looking like a fool in front of a large audience. I therefore chose the title of my talk to minimize the risk of ridicule: if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.
So what follows should be seen as a farrago of speculation by a guy who earns his living telling entertaining lies for money.
The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?
I’d like to start by making a few basic assumptions about the future, some implicit and some explicit: if only to narrow the field.
For starters, it’s not impossible that we’ll render ourselves extinct through warfare, be wiped out by a gamma ray burster or other cosmological sick joke, or experience the economic equivalent of a kernel panic – an unrecoverable global error in our technosphere. Any of these could happen at some point in the next five and a half centuries: survival is not assured. However, I’m going to spend the next hour assuming that this doesn’t happen – otherwise there’s nothing much for me to talk about.
The idea of an AI singularity has become common currency in SF over the past two decades – that we will create human-equivalent general artificial intelligences, and they will proceed to bootstrap themselves to ever-higher levels of nerdish god-hood, and either keep us as pets or turn us into brightly coloured machine parts. I’m going to palm this card because it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV. More to the point, the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men. I do expect us to develop some eerily purposeful software agents over the next decades, tools that can accomplish human-like behavioural patterns better than most humans can, but all that’s going to happen is that those behaviours are going to be reclassified as basically unintelligent, like playing chess or Jeopardy.
In addition to all this Grinch-dom, I’m going to ignore a whole grab-bag of toys from science fiction’s toolbox. It may be fun in fiction, but if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS. This is non-constructive. You can’t look for ways to harden systems against threats that emerge from the existence of Leprechauns or Martians or invisible pink unicorns. So, no Hollywood movie scenarios need apply.
Having said which, I cheerfully predict that at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down, just as the internet has pretty much invalidated any survey of the future of computer security that might have been carried out in 1961.
So what do I expect the world of 2061 to look like?
I am going to explicitly assume that we muddle through our current energy crises, re-tooling for a carbon-neutral economy based on a mixture of power sources. My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power. Meanwhile, intermittent renewables such as solar and wind power will be hooked to batteries for load smoothing, used to power up off-grid locations such as much of the (current) developing world, and possibly used on a large scale to produce storable fuels – hydrocarbons via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, or hydrogen gas vial electrolysis.
We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry. This doesn’t mean magic nanite pixie-dust a la Star Trek; it means, at a minimum, what today we’d consider to be exotic structural materials. It also means engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems, but much more efficiently and controllably, and under a much wider range of temperatures and pressures.
Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass. Both the Boeing and the flock of seagulls can fly, and both of them need a supply of organic fuel to oxidize in order to do so. But a flock of thirty tons of seagulls can’t carry a hundred passengers across the Atlantic, and Boeings don’t lay eggs. Designed nanosystems don’t need to be general-purpose replicators.
(Incidentally, I’ve been banging on about energy and mechanical efficiency because without energy we don’t have a technological civilization, and without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead. Communications infrastructure depends on power; without it, we’re nowhere.)
Where I’m going to stick my neck out, is that I predict great things for medicine and biology over the next century. At the beginning of this talk I said that if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk. I’m actually agnostic about the possibility that some of us may still be around then. There are a bunch of major medical obstacles to smash flat before that becomes possible, but we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology – one made possible by massively parallel number-crunching and networking – and we’re beginning to work out just how complex our intracellular machinery is. Whole new areas of cellular biology have opening up in the past decade; RNA interference as a mechanism for modulating gene expression, how the topology of chromosomal folding affects genetics, a bunch of stuff that wasn’t even on the horizon in 2001. Getting a handle on your ignorance is the first step on the road to understanding. And the long-term benefits are likely to be huge.
We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it. And I think it’s quite likely that within another century the mechanisms underlying cellular senescence will be understood and treatable like other inborn errors of metabolism – in this case, ones that aren’t weeded out by natural selection because they do not impact the organism’s survival fitness until it has already long since passed reproductive age.
This, incidentally, leads me to another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.
Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide – there are now more democracies than any other system, and even authoritarian tyrannies find it expedient to ape at least the outward symbolism of democratic forms, via rigged elections and life presidencies.
As the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and then the Arab Spring demonstrated, popular support for democracy and freedom of speech is not exceptional: it exists and is expressed everywhere where it is not actively suppressed. Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it – but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent. If enough people get angry they can vote the bums out, and the bums will go – you don’t need to hold a civil war.
Unfortunately there are problems with democracy. In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years: if a project doesn’t come to fruition within their time in office, it’s less than useful to them. Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies, or disciplined radical parties that simply refuse to negotiate. The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents – such as responses to climate instability or resource shortages or new communications media. Finally, representative democracy scales up badly – on the largest scales, those of national governments with populations in the tens to hundreds of millions, it tends towards voter apathy and alienation from the process of government – a pervasive sense that “voting doesn’t change anything” – because individual voters are distant from their representatives. Questionable e-voting technologies with poor anonymization or broken audit capabilities don’t help, of course.
Nor are governments as important as they used to be. National governments are constrained by external treaties – by some estimates, up to two-thirds of primary legislation in the UK has its origins in EU directives or WTO and WIPO trade treaties. Even the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.
Ultimately, a lot of the decision-making power of government in the 21st century is pushed down a level, to civil service committees and special interest groups: and so we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability. At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.
Now I want to talk a bit about economic development, because that’s one of the key determinants of the shape of the world we live in.
Having asserted – as I said, you can point and mock later – that we’re going to solve the energy crises, continue to burn non-fossil oil for transport, and get better materials and medical treatments, I’d like to look at the shape of our civilization.
Here in San Francisco it probably sometimes seems like the United States of America is the centre of the world. In a very real way it was, within living memory: in 1945, about 60% of global GDP came out of this nation, because the rest of the developed world had been pounded flat. Today, the United States, with around 5% of the planet’s population, is responsible for around 25% of planetary GDP. Note that this isn’t an absolute decline – the USA today is richer than it was in 1945. Rather, the rest of the world has been playing catch-up.
Something similar happened in the 19th century; in 1860 the United Kingdom, cradle of the industrial revolution, occupied about the same position relative to the rest of the world that the USA occupied in 1945. Today, the UK is down to 3.5% of planetary GDP, albeit with less than 1% of population. The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.
I’m not telling you anything new if I mention that the big story of the period from 1985 to 2015 is the development of China and India. Both nations – together they account for 2.5 billion people, more than four times the USA and EU combined – are sustaining economic growth at close to 10% per annum, compounded over long periods. Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development. (The population time bomb that mesmerized futurologists in the 1970s has, happily, fizzled.)
A less noticed phenomenon is that of Africa’s development. Africa is a huge continent, home to around a billion people in 53 nations. Africa entered the 1980s in dismal shape; even today, 34 of those 53 nations are ranked among the UN’s list of 48 least developed countries.
However, a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa. During the past decade, overall economic growth averaged a more-than-respectable 5% per annum; some areas are experiencing growth in the 6–7% range. Africa in 2011 is still very poor, but it is the poverty of the 1860s, not the 1660s. The short term prognosis for Africa as a continent is good – and I would hazard a guess that, barring unexpected setbacks such as an even larger war than the Congo conflict, Africa will follow China and India up the development curve before 2040.
In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.
We’re used to thinking of our world as being divided into economic zones – the developed nations, primarily urban and relatively wealthy, surmounting an immense pool of misery and mediaeval rural deprivation. But by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.
(Checks wrist-watch.)
This is USENIX Security and I’m 10 minutes into my talk and I haven’t mentioned computers or networks. Some of you are probably getting bored or irritated by now, and it’s too early for an after-lunch nap, and I’m too low-tech to give you hypnosis by powerpoint. So let me get round to the stuff you came to hear about.
And let me say, before I do, that the picture I just painted – of the world circa 2061, which is to say of the starting point from which the world of 2561 will evolve – is bunk. It’s a normative projection, an if-this-goes-on kind of future, based on the assumption that lots of stuff won’t happen. No fourth world war, no alien invasion, no AI singularity, no rapture of the nerds, no singularity of the baptists. In actual fact, I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961. But even if no such black swans take wing, the world of 2061 is still going to be really odd, because the pervasive spread of networking technologies that we’ve witnessed over the past half century is only the beginning. And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.
Let me start with an analogy.
Let’s imagine that, circa 1961 – just fifty years ago – a budding Nikolai Tesla or Bill Packard somewhere in big-city USA is tinkering in his garage and succeeds in building a time machine.
Being adventurous – but not too adventurous – he sets the controls for fifty years in the future, and arrives in downtown San Francisco.
What will he see, and how will he interpret it?
Well, a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar. Those that aren’t – much of the skyline – will at least look like the city of the future so familiar to us from magazines of the 1930s through the 1960s. Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted, and an obsession with aerodynamics might be taken for just another fashion fad. (The ten million lines of code and multiple microprocessors within the average 2011 car are, of course, invisible.) Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions, but that’s to be expected.
He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens. But earphones weren’t unheard of in 1961, and pocket television sets were one of the routine signs that you’re in the future now, as far back as Dick Tracy.
But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves … and why do all the advertising posters have a line of alphabet soup ending in ‘.com’ on them?
The outward shape of the future contains the present and the past, embedded within it like flies in amber. Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings: after all, they all existed in his own time. But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks, and thinks of computers as mainframes trapped in air-conditioned rooms, and if he’s even aware of hypertext as a concept it’s in the form Vannevar Bush described in his essay “How We May Think” published in The Atlantic in 1945. Cellular radio networks lay in the future; the 1961 iteration of mobile telephony was the MTS network, which was entirely operator-assisted and ran over a bunch of about 25 VHF frequencies. Licklider’s paper proposing a packet-switched network to allow general communications among computer users wasn’t published until 1962. And while Jack Kilby’s first working example of an integrated circuit was demonstrated in fall of 1958, the first IC based computers didn’t come along until the 1960s.
Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using. And as for the social consequences of the technologies in question – beyond lots of people wandering the streets holding conversations with imaginary companions – that’s an even longer reach. The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.
Let me take mobile phones as an example. They let people talk to one another – that much is obvious. What is less obvious is that for the first time the telephone network connects people, not places – it’s possible for new social behaviours to emerge. For example, people who are wandering a city’s streets can contact one another and decide to meet at a coffee shop, even if neither of them is near a fixed land line for which the other has a phone number. This example might strike you as trivial, but it represents an immense behavioural shift. Add in text messaging and GPS and mobile internet access and yet more behavioural shifts are possible. The current riots in London and elsewhere in the UK, for example, appear to be coordinated by Blackberry Messenger and text messaging, as looters exchange information about promising locations that are unprotected by the police. And the behavioural consequences of mobile phones go right off the map once we have a mature LTE or WiMax network, and once the telcos have been bludgeoned into providing plumbing rather than trying to renting you the dishwasher and the kitchen taps.
For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go. It’s not hard to envisage an app that goes a step beyond Google Maps on your smartphone, whereby it not only shows you how to get from point A to point B, but it can book transport to get you there – by taxi, ride-share, or plane – within your budgetary and other constraints. That’s not even far-fetched: it’s just what you get when you tie the mutant offspring of Hipmunk or Kayak into Google, and add Paypal. But to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house (if he lives nearby), or a Greyhound bus station, or the airport. (Better hope he’s not visiting Nepal; that could be expensive.)
Smartphones aren’t merely there to make your high school geography teacher weep, just as pocket calculators made maths teachers cry a generation ago. Something like 50% of smartphone users check their work email while they’re on vacation; a vast majority check work email when they’re away from their desk. The whole point of the desk was, for many people in the 20th century, to be a place of contact where co-workers or customers could reach them reliably during fixed office hours. Our phones aren’t quite up to the job of replacing the office desk today, but with picoprojectors and more bandwidth in the pipeline they show every sign of hitting that point within the next five to ten years. Even today, a typical iOS or Android handset has about as many MIPS as a workstation circa 2001–2003. It’s not immediately obvious why most office workers need many more orders of magnitude more computing power than that to get the job done – at least in their pocket, as opposed to in a server farm somewhere in the cloud.
We already saw a bunch of changes in office jobs come in with laptops. Hot-desking isn’t easy when employees are tied to a specific location by wires. Similarly, it’s going in the opposite direction in some sectors; following a spate of embarrassing “laptop left in taxi” stories in the last few years, large chunks of the British civil service no longer use laptops, instead relying on desktop PCs and wired ethernet, with biometrically authenticated thumb drives to store employee-specific credentials.
All this, of course, assumes we have jobs to go to. The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs. So I’m going to tip-toe away from that ticking bomb …
What of the non-employment-related impact of smartphones? Most people spend most of their lives away from the desk, away from work, doing other stuff. Surfing the web for silly cat photographs or porn, trying to keep the multiple facets of their identity from colliding messily on Facebook – forget online dating, how many teens have met their girlfriend or boyfriend’s parents for the first time via FB? – checking competitors’ prices from the aisles in WalMart, and texting while driving. We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.
So let me start by trying to predict the mobile internet of 2061.
To some extent, the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication – be it fibre in the ground or wireless or optical frequencies over the air – funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost. The latter is vastly preferable. I’m British, and I’m carrying a smartphone today that has an IQ of about 70 – a full-fat iphone 4 that is, despite everything, as dumb as a brick. The trouble is that I’m using it with a SIM from a British cellco whose international roaming data rate is around US $5 per megabyte. Welcome back to the internet of the early 1990s! To get around the problem I’ve got a Virgin Mobile MiFi, a cellular wifi router. But it comes with an unwelcome constraint – even the so-called “unlimited” tariff limits me to 2.5Gb of data in a month. If I go over that cap, the connection will be throttled. And I could blow through that cap in a couple of hours, just by downloading a new software update for my laptop.
From my dumb consumer’s perspective, it’d be preferable to pay a higher, but fixed, price for infrastructure – then I could download all the OS updates, or movies, or whatever, at will. But this is obviously less than appealing to Sprint, or AT&T, or whoever – they’d all much rather artificially depress demand by imposing punitive charges on heavy users, because installing new infrastructure is expensive.
These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies. A model where bandwidth on the backhaul is capped implies lots of peer-to-peer traffic over local area networks and lots of caching, but relatively little long haul traffic. It implies that more powerful processors are needed at the edge of the network because offloading the job of OCR’ing that fifty page construction contract to the cloud means uploading fifty pages of bitmapped scans, which will cost money: you can’t outsource your brains. In contrast, a model where you just rent the fibre or wireless spectrum for a fixed price implies a lot more activity in the cloud, with thin clients. (And yes, I know full well we’ve been chewing this tension between business models over since the 1990s.)
This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian, a GNU vision of telecommunications that can’t actually work on a large scale because the routing topology of such a network is going to be nightmarish unless there are some fat fibre optic cables somewhere in the picture. It’s kind of a shame – I’d love to see a future where no corporate behemoths have a choke hold on the internet – but humans aren’t evenly distributed geographically.
Our best hope may be that the new middle-class African, Indian and Chinese populations will benefit from the kind of shiny new infrastructure that we in crumbling Europe and American can only dream of – and that eventually this goads our local infrastructure services into raising their game. Or that some radically disruptive new technology comes along: open access peer to peer mesh networks using DIY remotely piloted drones whipped up on garage 3D printers as home brew laser relays to span long distances and fill the fibre gap, for example. Mind you, the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust? Such a world is going to be either crime-ridden or pervasively encrypted and inhabited by natives who are required to be perfectly spherical cypherpunks – just like my eighty-something parents. Not!
A brief aside on storage density is in order at this point. I’m throwing around fairly gigantic amounts of data in this talk – where are we going to store it all? The answer is, as Richard Fenyman put it in 1959, there’s plenty of room at the bottom. Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond. It’s a diamondoid mesh, within which the state of a single data bit is encoded in each atom: because we want it to be rigid and stable, we use a carbon–12 nucleus to represent a zero, and a carbon-thirteen to represent a one. How we read and write these bits is left as an exercise for the student of mature molecular nanotechnology, but we can say with some certainty that we can store Avogadro’s number of bits – 6 x 1023 – in 12.5 grams of carbon, or around 13 thousand terabytes in an ounce of memory diamond. Going by the figures in a report from UCSD last year, the average worker processed or consumed 3 terabytes per year, and there are around 3.18 billion workers; which works out at 23 tons of memory diamond needed to store everything without compression or deduplication. At a guess, once you take out cute captioned cat videos and downloads that annoy the hell out of the MPAA you can reduce that by an order of magnitude.
(So I conclude that yes, in the long term we will have more storage capacity than we necessarily know what to do with.)
Now, wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems. This bandwidth is spread between all the users within a given cell – the smaller the cell the better, obviously. I’ve recently been hearing some interesting noise about the possibility of using multiple-input/multiple-output to get around Shannon’s Law – notably from a startup called OnLive – using multiple transmitters to produce constructive or destructive interference around each receiver’s antenna. This may be snake oil, or there may be something there. Even so, even if MIMO works perfectly, it’s hard to see how we can get past that hard limit of 2 tb/sec per wireless host.
So, let’s approximate the upper limit on bandwidth to 2 tb/person, by postulating a mixture of novel compression algorithms and really tiny cells.
What can you do with 2 terabits per second per human being on the planet? (Let alone 2tb/sec per wireless device, given that we’re already within a handful of years of having more wireless devices than people?)
One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.
The basic idea behind lifelogging is simple enough: wear a couple of small, unobtrusive camera chips and microphones at all time. Stream their output, along with metadata such as GPS coordinates and a time sequence to a server somewhere. Working offline, the server performs speech-to-text on all the dialogue you utter or hear, face recognition on everyone you see, OCR on everything you read, and indexes it against images and location. Whether it’s performed in the cloud or in your smartphone is irrelenvant – the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.
We’re already used to prosthetic memory to some extent; I used Google multiple times in the preparation of this talk, to retrieve specific dates and times of stuff I vaguely recalled but couldn’t bring directly to memory. But Google and other search engines are a collective prosthetic memory that can only scrutinize the sunlit upper waters of the sea of human experience, the ones that have been committed to writing and indexed. Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.
Initially I see lifelogging having specific niches; as an aid for people with early-stage dementia or other memory impairments, or to allow students to sleep through lectures. Police in the UK are already experimenting with real time video recording of interactions with the public – I suspect that before long we’re going to see cops required to run lifelogging apps constantly when on duty, with the output locked down as evidence. And it’ll eventually become mandatory for other people who work in professions where they are exposed to any risk that might result in a significant insurance claim – surgeons, for example, or truck drivers – not by force of law but as a condition of insurance cover.
Lifelogging into the cloud doesn’t require much bandwidth in absolute terms, although it will probably take a few years to take off if the cellcos succeed in imposing bandwidth caps. A few terabytes per year per person should suffice for a couple of basic video streams and full audio, plus locational metadata – multiply by ten if you want high definition video at a high frame rate. And the additional hardware – beyond that which comes in a 2011 smartphone – is minimal: a couple of small webcams and microphones connected over some sort of short range personal area network, plus software to do the offline indexing.
Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course. Under what circumstances can your lifelog legally be accessed by third parties? And how do privacy laws apply? It should be clear that anyone currently lifelogging in this way takes their privacy – and that of the people around them – very lightly: as far as governments are concerned they can subpoena any data they want, usually without even needing a court warrant. Projects such as the UK’s Interception Modernization Program – essentially a comprehensive internet communications retention system mandated by government and implemented by ISPs – mean that if you become a person of interest to the security services they’d have access to everything. The prudent move would be to lifelog to encrypted SSDs in your personal possession. Or not to do it at all. The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When only elite computer scientists on ARPANet had accounts so they can telnet into mainframes at another site, security was just a desirable luxury item – part of the apex of the pyramid of needs. But when it’s your memory or your ability to do paid employment, security gets to be something close to food and water and shelter: you can’t live without it.
On the up side, if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft. Coupled with some sort of global identification system and a system of access permissions that would allow limited queries against a private citizen’s lifelog, it’d be very difficult to fake an alibi for a crime, or to impersonate someone else. If Bill the Gangster claims he was in the pub the night of a bank robbery, you can just query the cloud of lifelogs with a hash of his facial features, the GPS location of the pub, and the time he claims he was there. If one or more people’s lifelogs provide a match, Bill has an alibi. Alternatively, if a whole bunch of folks saw him exiting the back of the bank with a sack marked SWAG, that tells a different story. Faking up an alibi in a pervasively lifelogged civilization will be very difficult, requiring the simultaneous corruption of multiple lifelogs in a way that portrays a coherent narrative.
So whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.
Lifelogging need not merely be something for humans. You can already buy a collar-mounted camera for your pet dog or cat; I think it’s pretty likely that we’re going to end up instrumenting farm animals as well, and possibly individual plants such as tomato vines or apple trees – anything of sufficient value that we don’t kill it after it has fruited. Lifelogging for cars is already here, if you buy a high end model; sooner or later they’re all going to be networked, able to book themselves in for preventative maintenance rather than running until they break down and disrupt your travel. Not to mention snitching on your acceleration and overtaking habits to the insurance company, at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.
And then there are the other data sources we can import into the internet.
We’re currently living through a period in genomics research that is roughly equivalent to the early 1960s in computing. In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing. Back in 1989, it was anticipated that the human genome project would cost on the order of $3Bn and take two decades. In practice, it cost a lot less, and was completed well ahead of schedule – with around 90% of the work being done in the last 18 months, thanks to the development of automated high speed sequencers. We’re now seeing a mass of disruptive technologies for high throughput DNA sequencing appear, with full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years. The technologies in question, such as DNA microarrays, are benefiting from the same miniaturisation cycle as semiconductors three to five decades ago, and analysis of the resulting data in turn relies on the availability of cheap supercomputing clusters. The Archon X-Prize for genomics, established in 2006 and likely to be won in the next couple of years, promises $10 million to “the first Team that can build a device and use it to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less, with certain accuracy constraints, at a recurring cost of no more than $10,000 (US) per genome.”
Now, there’s probably no reason to exhaustively sequence your own genome more than once. And your genome isn’t the rigid determinant of your health and metabolic fate that it was believed to be in the naive, pre-scientific dark ages of the late 1980s. We are, if anything, only just beginning to scope out the extent of our own ignorance of how our cellular biology really works. But we live within an ecosystem of other organisms. Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one. (They’re mostly much smaller than our own cells.) These are for the most part commensal organisms – they live in our guts and predigest our food, or on our skin – and they play a significant role in the functioning of our immune system. One of the most dangerous medical crises we face today is the spread of antibiotic resistance among pathogenic organisms: lest we forget, as recently as the 1930s fully 30% of us could expect to die of a fulminating bacterial infection. Old threats like tuberculosis are re-emerging in the form of multidrug resistant strains; and new ones are also appearing. Most members of the public seem not to understand how close we came to catastrophe in 2006 with SARS – a disease not unlike the common cold in its infectious virulence, but with a 15% associated mortality rate. Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.
A second crisis we face is that of cancer, almost invariably the emergent consequence of a malfunction within the genetic machinery of a cell that causes it to start dividing and refuse to stop. Today, 40% of the population of the UK, where I live, are expected to develop some sort of cancer at some point in their lives.
With genome sequencing microarrays tending towards the price and efficiency of VLSI circuits, and serious bandwidth available to upload and process the data stream they deliver, we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment. This will deliver both personal benefits – catching early signs of infectious diseases or cancer – but also, more importantly, providing health agencies with early warning of epidemics. If our metagenomic environment is routinely included in lifelogs, we have the holy grail of epidemiology within reach; the ability to exhaustively track the spread of pathogens and identify how they adapt to their host environment, right down to the level of individual victims.
Is losing your genomic privacy an excessive price to pay for surviving cancer and evading plagues?
Is compromising your sensory privacy through lifelogging a reasonable price to pay for preventing malicious impersonation and apprehending criminals?
Is letting your insurance company know exactly how you steer and hit the gas and brake pedals, and where you drive, an acceptable price to pay for cheaper insurance?
In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.
I’m not talking about our identities in the conventional information security context of our access credentials to information resources, but of our actual identities as physically distinct human beings. We use the term “identity theft” today to talk about theft of access credentials – in this regime, “identity theft” means something radically more drastic. If we take a reductionist view of human nature – as I’m inclined to – our metagenomic context (including not just our own genome and proteome, but the genome of our gut flora and fauna and the organisms we coexist with) and our sensory inputs actually define who we are, at least from the outside. And that’s not a lot of data to capture, if you look at it in the context of two terabits per second of bandwidth per person. Assume a human life expectancy of a century, and a terabit per second of data to log everything about that person, and you can capture a human existence in roughly 3.15 x 1021 bits … or about 65 milligrams of memory diamond.
With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies. Unfortunately we can no more expect the general public to become security professionals than we can expect them to become judo black-belts or expert marksmen. Security is going to be a perpetual, on-going problem.
Moreover, right now we have the luxury of a short history; the world wide web is twenty years old, the internet is younger than I am, and the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes. Who remembers GeoCities today? Nor is there much to be gained by a black hat from brute-force decrypting a bunch of ten year old credit card accounts.
But it’s not going to be like that in the future. We can expect the pace of innovation to slow drastically, once we can no longer count on routinely more powerful computing hardware or faster network connections coming along every eighteen months or so. But some forms of personal data – medical records, for example, or land title deeds – need to remain accessible over periods of decades to centuries. Lifelogs will be similar; if you want at age ninety to recall events from age nine, then a stable platform for storing your memory is essential, and it needs to be one that isn’t trivially crackable in less than eighty-one years and counting.
Robustness and durabilitiy are going to be at a premium in the future – even if we don’t get those breakthroughs in life extension medicine that will allow you to mock me for getting it wrong when we meet again in 2561.
So, to summarize: we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls. Storing and indexing the data from such exhaustive lifelogging is, if not trivial, certainly do-able (the average human being utters around 5000 words per day, and probably reads less than 50,000; these aren’t impossible speech-to-text and OCR targets). And while there are plausible reasons why we might not be able to assert the overriding importance of personal privacy in such data, it’s also clear that a complete transcript of every word you ever utter in your life (or hear uttered), with accompanying visuals and (for all I know) smell and haptic and locational metadata, is of enormous value.
Which leads me to conclude that it’s nearly impossible to underestimate the political significance of information security on the internet of the future. Rather than our credentials and secrets being at risk – our credit card accounts and access to our email – our actual memories and sense of self may be vulnerable to tampering by a sufficiently deft attacker. From being an afterthought or a luxury – relevant only to the tiny fraction of people with accounts on time-sharing systems in the 1970s – security is pushed down the pyramid of needs until it’s important to all of us. Because it’s no longer about our property, physical or intellectual, or about authentication: it’s about our actual identity as physical human beings.
via: Boing Boing
