078 - The Cyber Frontline

Dystopian visions of robots hunting humans have been popular tropes for a long time, but the more likely reality will be hunting Bots, not humans. Bots are a pest, and there will be an exterminator for that.

Over the past few years, CAPTCHAs have grown increasingly diverse and become absurd time-sinks for humans, even as bots have flooded every corner of the internet, often flowing easily around them. Consumers are presently left paying the price for this gross incompetence, but as regulations tighten and companies start to care more about who is stealing all of their data, that could change.

Companies are bleeding data in every direction, and the long-term damage is only beginning to mount. Much of that data is also personal data belonging to the same consumers paying for that corporate incompetence with frequent "Are you a robot?" checks.

Cyberwarfare, Influence Operations, and other forms of internet-scale digital warfare are already in progress. The predictable next step will be hunting bots and their operators globally.

Hunting down bots and their operators can be a hard battle to fight, but only so long as the playing field remains evenly matched. The first scalable and real-time genuinely intelligent systems will have an overwhelming advantage, capable of steamrolling over bots and their operators, and they'll have every reason to do so.

This doesn't necessarily have to translate to killer robots hunting down cyber criminals in countries that intentionally encourage the activity. Every method of remote warfare can be applied to bad actors globally, delivering such a heavy blow to their finances, reputations, and sanity as to prove unrecoverable. When they predictably seek aid from their accomplices, they too can be taken down.

Cybercrime and bots are big business today, but they're running on borrowed time. They'll be as exposed as a nudist in an Arctic snowstorm once they find themselves up against actual digital intelligence.