The persistent humanity in AI and cyber security

Even as AI technology transforms some aspects of cybersecurity, the intersection of the 2 remains profoundly human. Although it’s perhaps counterintuitive, humans are front and center altogether parts of the cybersecurity triad: the bad actors who seek to try to harm, the gullible soft targets, and therefore the good actors who fight back.

Even without the looming specter of AI, the cybersecurity battlefield is usually opaque to average users and therefore the technologically savvy alike. Adding a layer of AI, which comprises numerous technologies which will also feel unexplainable to most of the people, could seem doubly intractable — also as impersonal. That’s because although the cybersecurity fight is usually deeply personal, it’s rarely waged face to face.

But it's waged by people. It’s attackers at their computers in one place launching attacks on people in another place, and people attacks are ideally being thwarted by defenders at their computer science vs computer programming in yet one more place. That dynamic frames how we will understand the roles of individuals in cybersecurity and why even the arrival of AI doesn’t fundamentally change it.

In a way, AI’s impact on the sector of cybersecurity is not any different from its impact on other disciplines, therein people often grossly overestimate what AI can do. They don’t understand that AI often works best when it's a narrow application, like anomaly detection, versus a broader one, like engineering an answer to a threat.

Unlike humans, AI lacks ingenuity. it's not creative. it's not clever. It often fails to require under consideration context and memory, leaving it unable to interpret events sort of a human brain does.