The Day A Radio Station Bricked A Lot Of Mazdas

[ArMaP]

3. In today's age, information is power.  Information has always been power, but today it's at a premium because of all the complicated electronics running things.  The "bad guys" of the world realize this, and have every intention of taking advantage of it.  We see it almost weekly anymore with reports of Denial of Service attacks.  Just look at what happened with the massive Kronos timekeeping system hack of 2021.  Fully 3.5 years, YEARS, later there are still countless businesses who have still not recovered.  Entire Cities were crippled by this ransom-ware attack, and Cities like Baltimore, Denver and others, are still struggling with it.  This, after paying billions of dollars in ransom money.  So, what's society's solution?  Answer: Put even more electronic devices out there!  (Note:  Probably the wrong answer).

The problem for cases like that is that the answer should have been given before the problem: backups.
If they had recent backups they just needed to restore those backups (after "cleaning" the computers) and would be back to normal (or almost, depending on the age of the last backup) in a couple of days (depending on the amount of data to restore).

One big problem with all today's "information society" is that few people make backups of that information, so when something bad happens (and it's mostly a question of "when", not "if") they are left looking at what used to be important and now is nothing.

5.  Lastly, and then there's Artificial Intelligence (AI).  We've already seen how it can run amok.  Why?  Because it has to draw its information from somewhere, and this 'somewhere' is the Interwebz, which is the single largest repository of data on planet Earth...but not all of it is correct / right.  In fact, as we all know, much of the Internet is straight-up wrong (misinformation, biased information, etc.).  When we throw AI into this big ol' bucket of goo, well, then we could (and likely will) wind up with a mess which humans are not even capable of fixing because computers are doing the thinking for us.  What then?

Pull the plug???

Depending on the use, AI can use unfiltered data from the Internet or not. Relying on unfiltered data is asking for trouble, but it gives results faster (and cheaper).

Using a new technology just because it's new is always a danger, we should use it like it is, a tool for doing something, not for doing everything for us.