IT Essentials: Rage against the machine

Apparently it’s the newest form of extremism

For one wonderful week, I managed to forget about politics, economics and AI. The people protesting the technology did not.

Fresh back from our son’s first holiday, I can more than ever appreciate the value in turning off the news and getting out into the sunlight once in a while. But not everyone sees AI as something that can be safely ignored.

That’s why a growing anti-AI movement is gathering steam. While it’s currently mostly limited to legitimate criticism, there have already been incidences of violence.

That’s all the excuse US federal law enforcement agencies needed to issue warnings about “anti-tech extremism” this week; a sweeping label suggesting everyone involved in the movement is an internet-refusing Luddite. In reality, the protests are solely about AI and the datacentres behind the technology.

Those protests are already paying dividends for activists. Just this week a developer in New Hampshire withdrew plans to build a datacentre in the state hours before a scheduled planning meeting, which was expected to draw large (and angry) crowds.

Also this week, environmental activist Erin Brokovich (yes, that one) launched a site using crowdsourced information to plot datacentre locations across the USA. That’s sure to ruffle feathers in Silicon Valley, whose firms prefer not to broadcast the locations of their server farms in fear of exactly the protests building from Texas to Tokyo.

And yet, as the Luddites found, it’s hard to stand in the way of progress. GCHQ chief Anne Keast-Butler calls AI an “unstoppable force.” Rather than blocking tech firms, she says government agencies should work with them; though that does rely on those same firms being willing to work as partners, not dictators.

But possibly the protestors have nothing to worry about; AI could well end up being too expensive for anyone to use anyway. How’s that for irony?

Cool heads are needed to navigate the AI revolution on both developer and consumer fronts, and Mike Ettling of Sapiens tries to soothe fears around the ‘SaaSpocalypse’.

On cyber, we’ve dug into research from Barclays and Cybermindz, revealing both rising security budgets (at last) and an efficient place to spend that money: your cyber team’s own resilience training.

And we’ve published two podcasts this week. On our own Ctrl Alt Lead I talked to the GSMA’s Head of Industry Security, Samantha Kight, about why the mobile fraud ecosystem is now more lucrative than the drugs trade for organised criminals; and our colleagues at MES Computing dug into the real-world case study of a credit union that dropped VMware in favour of a hybrid cloud environment powered by Azure.