In the video at this link and embedded below I provide some context on new approaches to data can enhance outcomes for public sector organizations, with a focus on real world use cases. I also mention key requirements which apply at most government organizations for their data and how organizations are addressing their unique requirements with technology provided by Cloudera:
You And Everyone You Know Should Study This Report On The Cyber Threat
Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson published an important piece for Bloomberg news titled:
UglyGorilla Hack of U.S. Utility Exposes Cyberwar Threat
This well researched piece provides context on the threat I believe all technologists should understand. In fact, it is so important, I think every citizen should read it and think about its implications.
A preview from the piece:
Somewhere in China, a man typed his user name, “ghost,” and password, “hijack,” and proceeded to rifle the computers of a utility in the Northeastern U.S.
He plucked schematics of its pipelines. He copied security-guard patrol memos. He sought access to systems that regulate the flow of natural gas. He cruised channels where keystrokes could cut off a city’s heat, or make a pipeline explode.
That didn’t appear to be his intention, and neither was economic espionage. While he was one of the Chinese officers the U.S. charged last month with infiltrating computers to steal corporate secrets, this raid was different. The hacker called UglyGorilla invaded the utility on what was probably a scouting mission, looking for information China could use to wage war.
UglyGorilla is one of many hackers the FBI has watched. Agents have recorded raids by other operatives in China and in Russia and Iran, all apparently looking for security weaknesses that could be employed to disrupt the delivery of water and electricity and impede other functions critical to the economy, according to former intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation. The incursions spurred a debate in the Obama administration over whether and how to respond, and raised alarms among lawmakers briefed on the incidents.
Read more at: UglyGorilla Hack of U.S. Utility Exposes Cyberwar Threat
I’m reminded this is a perfect example of something Matt Devost has been talking about for years including at the first FedCyber Summit (http://www.fedcyber.com). For additional context, check out this blog post discussing attacks against critical infrastructure:
http://www.oodaloop.com/
That is totally spot-on, don’t you think?
We track these and many related issues in our CyberWar site.
For more on these topics see the CTOvision Guide to National Security Technology and
Marc Andreessen on the future of technology and implications for enhancing government dialog with citizens
This is the fifth installment in our series flowing from recent dialog with Marc Andreessen. In this post we provide some of Marc’s thoughts regarding ways that government can improve the dialog underway with citizens on the future of automation.
Gourley: How can government start a dialogue with citizens on how AI, robotics and the coming paradigm crushing collision of physical and cyber worlds?
Andreessen: This is a hard question to give an answer to. But I know it is an important one to deal with and there is a need for this dialog now. It is instructive to consider the current issues with NSA. For 50 years the operational assumption was that NSA could work under a “trust me” basis with citizens. Now there has to be a new dialog and trust rebuilt. It is much easier in this case to point to the problem than the solution and the same can probably be said about the broader topic of how to have this new dialogue with citizens.
The good news is that the Internet provides a channel for enhanced communications in many ways. For example, look at the newly established White House petition process called “We The People” where petitions that get a large number of signatures are guaranteed to get a response. This is an early effort but clearly one worth watching. It would be good to see more activities like this, including more online focus groups, discussions, google hangouts with leaders and other engagements.
On a related note, consider the still too common way politicians communicate with crowds during campaigns. The old and still common way is for a politician to give an old but slightly tweaked stump speech to a crowd. Now it is becoming much easier for any citizen to see any previous speech the candidate has given so they can tell if they are being patronized to.
Gourley: Other than national defense and law enforcement, what will be the role of the US government in this future world?
Andreessen: This is also hard to fully answer but one thing is becoming apparent. It is clear that change is accelerating dramatically and there are huge issues with how citizenry deal with the rates of change. Many people will be personally disrupted and others will have fear of having their careers disrupted. This will cause anxiety and concerns with how technology is being used. We should ask ourselves if we want our governments to have a role in helping our citizenry deal with the rapid rate of technological and societal change. We should also think through how change will increase the need for social safety nets. As changes come faster and faster and people’s lives become more disrupted, society will need to help. To embrace change and have capitalism and advancement we will also need a vigorous safety net. This includes help with education, training and other ways to reduce anxiety.
It feels to all of us that the world is changing fast, and it is.
Gourley: Thank you Marc.
Andreessen: My pleasure.
This concludes our five part series from our discussions with Marc Andreessen. Find all posts at:
- 1- Marc Andreessen on the Future of Technology and Implications for Government Service to Citizens: Likely scenarios of the future operating environment.
- 2- Marc Andreessen on the Future of Technology and the Nature of Government Services: Track leaders in industry to watch this evolve.
- 3- Marc Andreessen on the Future of Technology and Automation, Robotics, and AI can Impact Government Service: Issues on these topics exist in three major domains, Government, Business, Individuals
- 4- Marc Andreessen on the Future of Technology and Implications for Interactions Between Government and Citizens: Which government services will be online and what might the implications of that be?
- 5- Marc Andreessen on the Future of Technology and Implications for Enhancing Government Dialog with Citizens: The Internet is providing an enhanced channel for this dialog.
Marc Andreessen on the future of technology and implications for interactions between government and citizens
This is the fourth installment in our series flowing from recent dialog with Marc Andreessen. In this post we provide Marc’s thoughts around how automation and AI may change the nature of interaction between government and citizen.
Gourley: Do you have any suggestions that can help us think through how automation plus AI change the social fabric and interactions between citizens and government?
Andreessen: It is pretty clear that businesses are way out ahead on this one. There are very successful precedents that can be studied as we think through what is possible for AI to enhance government service to citizens. In the commercial world, Big Data and AI are closely related, with the most impactful AI being done by processing huge data sets and doing extreme learning against those data sets. Google is really best in class at this right now. Look at what they are doing with predictive search, Google now, contextual search, speech recognition, ad targeting – it’s all machine learning against big data. Google has been leading but we are seeing spinoffs of approaches applied by many other firms in other sectors. A key examplesto consider is health insurance. We can now envision entirely new ways of conceiving health insurance– if you take big data/machine learning approach. We can say the same with auto insurance and crop insurance, financial services, loan risk scoring – all of which can be done far more accurately now than historically.
Lessons to draw from these regarding the future of interactions between citizens and government include better, more relevant provisioning of social services and health support from government, tailored to individuals. Also consider the ability to better forecast disease and its prevention, both broadly for communities and tailored to specific individuals informed by genetics.
Also consider the application of AI and automation to constructs like the drivers license. The current approach where you go in, take a test and get a license is really ripe for automation, not just in the application process but in the continuous use and authorization to drive it implies. Consider AI that can tell if a person is driving poorly. Sensors in a car can tell if a person is drifting from lane to lane or rolling through stop signs or otherwise impaired. By 2030 will AI plus sensors be able to temporarily revoke a right to drive until the person is safe?
Gourley: What should technologists in government be thinking about to help accelerate virtuous change?
Andreessen: The use cases I mentioned above are really just a beginning. Keep thinking through use cases for AI in government service to citizens. There are so many more. My advice here is to track developments in the commercial world closely.
The next post in this series will dive into some ways we may be able to enhance the dialog underway today regarding the future of technology. Ensure you are on our newsletter distributions to be alerted when we publish.
Great Reference Graphic To Keep Your Brain Engaged On All Elements Of Big Data
The reference below was provided by friends at Altamira.
If you are an analyst, enterprise architect, CIO, CTO, CISO, CFO or even a business executive seeking insights into the nature of modern data solutions you will find the poster below to be a fantastic resource. Click to expand it to full view. Download and print and post on your wall to periodically review and to continue to ensure you are thinking of the many related elements of analytical solutions. The graphic was produced by three of the most highly regarded practitioners of real world data solutions I know, with contributions and mentorship of by one of the nation’s great enterprise architects.
Other Resources:
Great Reference Graphic To Keep Your Brain Engaged On All Elements Of Big Data
Sources of cyber intelligence from governments and academia
The Technology Behind Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Disease Research: An Interview with Simon Lovestone
What is the Cyber Conflict Studies Association?
You Should Run R On Your Computer: Not just for stats, but to know what all the excitement is about
Comprehending Machine Intelligence: Research and Graphic by Shivon Zilis
Marc Andreessen on the Future of Technology and Automation, Robotics, and AI can Impact Government Service
This is the third installment in our series flowing from recent dialog with Marc Andreessen. Previous posts discussed future tech scenarios around the year 2030 and context on government services in the future. In this post we provide Marc’s thoughts around the future of technology including automation, robotics and AI and implications for government, business and citizens.
Gourley: Marc can you give us thoughts that can help government technologists today think through the future of automation? In general, how can we shape an increasingly robotic/AI workforce in government to better serve citizens?
Andreessen: All indications are that 2030 will be primetime for this type of government service.
Let’s start with concepts of self driving cars. By 2030 we can expect self driving cars to be widely proliferated in governments, being used for functions like post office delivery at the federal level and many other uses at the state and local levels. Self driving aircraft are with us now, but consider the fully developed use of government and commercial drones in the near future. You will not be able to go outside without seeing drones overhead. Government use cases for them include weather reporting, law enforcement, health, environmental monitoring, traffic control, safety, emergency response and communications. The same environment will host many commercial drones that may also have those use cases but will also no doubt be there to collect information on consumers for marketing and other business reasons.
Which leads to the topic of surveillance. Drones are not the only platform, surveillance will be conducted from ground-based and building based sensors as well as on most all people you encounter. Just know it will be pervasive, with HD imagery and video potentially collected from anywhere, as well as collection of signals being emanated from smart devices we all carry.
Society will need to decide how to resolve issues/tensions associated with an environment like this. We can generally break these down into issues in three domains:
1) Government
2) Business
3) Individuals
At the government level, we will have to deal with issues regarding protection of civil liberties and ways to respect reasonable expectations of privacy while people are in public spaces.
Businesses today collect information on people and extrapolating out to 2030 shows even more issues to resolve there. The same concerns we have now will be apparent on much larger scale. Imagine data from your self driving car letting the shopping center know you are approaching, then HD video of you letting the shopping center have more tactical information on what you are wearing and correlating that with signals from your smart phone plus knowledge of your financial and purchasing history. There might be great benefits to consumers of this sort of advanced preparation of your arrival, but society will have to consider these many issues.
Individuals today are empowered with great abilities to sense what is going on around them, including information on other people around us. There are issues of safety and security that make this a very virtuous thing to do. But also issues of privacy for others.
At all three of these levels, government, business and individuals, there is a growing need for society to think through questions and implications of this coming world of integrated smart sensors, robotics and AI.
The next posts in this series will dive into the social fabric of interactions between citizens and government and then the coming paradigm crushing collision of physical and cyber worlds. Ensure you are on our newsletter distributions to be alerted when we publish.
Marc Andreessen on the future of technology and the nature of government services
This is the second installment in our series flowing from recent dialog with Marc Andreessen. The first post reviewed some likely scenarios of the tech enabled environment of 2030 and some foundational considerations regarding converged cyber-physical systems all citizens will have access to (see the first post here). In this post we provide some of Marc’s views around the nature of government services in the near future.
Gourley: In the near future of 2030, do you have thoughts on services that government currently delivers to citizens that will be done better or perhaps rendered obsolete because of new personal computing technologies?
Andreessen: We can assume that by 2030 all government services can be online.
A key area is legislation. Consider that law and code are related- law itself is a form of code, so in the timeframe we are talking about we will very likely see huge parts of the law move online. We are already seeing the use of the Internet as a reference to law, but consider it being delivered in a tailored way to inform. And consider having more online adjudication of both civil and criminal cases online. By 2030 we should expect to have virtual adjudication in many cases.
This is just one domain. Consider the many services that states are already moving online, like driver licenses and car registration. The Internet is changing the DMV and most every other state, federal and local government office.
Interacting with governments for healthcare will be far more refined than today, but more importantly, citizens will be served with healthcare from non government capabilities that will change the need for government interaction. Consider that by 2030 we will all have personal sensors that will have readings of every relevant aspect of our body chemistry and that can be used to better channel healthcare, with or without the government. These are just hints of elements that can help us think through the transformation of government service to an online global world.
For other hints, we can find parallels to how the smartphone enabled youth of today interact with financial services. Many young people today interact with their financial services in ways that will never require them to visit a bank. Extrapolate forward from that. By 2030 every citizen will primarily interact with financial services without visiting a facility. In the context of citizen to government interactions why would that be any different?
There are other categories of services that people will need and want from government. Consider new ways of interacting to shape policy, for example. Key among these is voting. At some point it will go online. Estonia is a pioneer of online voting and the big lessons learned is that it can be done reliably and in ways that satisfy the needs of citizens. There is no reason not to do this. Once the means for online voting is established this same channel can be used to ask other questions of citizens. Polling can be more frequent, as can sentiment assessment.
Citizens are already using the Internet to organize in ways their governments have not realized, now consider the year 2030 when there is far more political organizing happening online. The connected world of this era will have far more online petitions, fundraising, lobbying, grassroots efforts, pressure groups and protests. Internet services that provide those today are growing fast, like Change.org or NationBuilder.com for online campaigns. MoveOn has pioneered the approach and they clearly get it. Facebook and Twitter have been key parts of protests and demonstrations globally. Expect this trend to continue.
All this raises some interesting questions. As citizens become more interactive there can be more referendums and direct democracy. But there are negatives to consider with this approach. There are reasons to have a representative government. It can be very good to have a layer of representatives in between citizens and government.
The point is that society must figure out what levels of direct democracy we want. If government does not embrace it there is a high likelihood that citizens will use the power of the Internet and their applications to better mobilize against government. But if government embraces it too aggressively we can end up with mob rule.
The next posts in this series will dive into ways automation, robotics, and AI can impact government service and the social fabric of interactions between citizens and government. Ensure you are on our newsletter distributions to be alerted when we publish.
Marc Andreessen on the Future of Technology and Implications for Government Service to Citizens
If you are a professional in technology, government and/or business you have no doubt already been exposed to the very interesting Marc Andreessen.
Odds are many of our readers are already tracking his thoughts closely via his blog, his media interactions captured on YouTube and his very dynamic and thought engaging Twitter Feed where you can now track the dynamics of what he finds interesting day to day.
But have you ever wanted to dive deeper into Marc’s views on the future of technology as it relates to government services?
I had an opportunity to ask Marc a few questions and decided to focus on this topic in the hopes that the resulting discussion could prove to be informative to government technologists and the citizen thought leaders helping to shape the future of government to citizen interaction. The result was a series of five posts which may prove to be informative to your strategic planning.
With this first post, we do some scene setting discussion on what they world may be like 15 years from now and solicit Marc’s context:
Gourley: Marc, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the future technological environment with a focus on lessons for today’s government technologist. Your views on the contributions of new technologies to the future of government-citizen interactions would be most appreciated, as well as your views on the use of technologies that can help the government do its job better.
Andreessen: Sounds great.
Gourley: As a planning assumption, consider a future environment 15 years out. Projections are that by the year 2030 there will be 370 Million Americans, so not so much more than we have today. Imagine all of those citizens having access to all the compute power of highly evolved intelligent cloud-based and personal IT solutions and consider a world where cyber and physical systems have been deeply connected and where sensors abound. Assume bandwidth is available where ever it needs to be. Assume citizens are already being served with many benefits of this technology that governments used to provide. Do you think this is a plausible future? What would you add?
Andreessen: Could be a realistic scenario. It is certainly in keeping with our views. Some of the assumptions we (a16z) operate under is that we are just now getting a glimpse of a world where everyone will be online. The computer itself is only 70 years old, and only 7 years ago did the PC allow the first billion people to get online. Smartphones blew through that record, hitting 1.5 billion in 2013 and on track to reach the entire global population of 7 Billion by 2020. The price of smartphones is dropping fast and we may actually reach that number much earlier.
So it is very realistic to say that by 2030 people around the world will have lived in an age of smartphones for a full decade. So these people will have a decade of experience living with a supercomputer in their pocket. Citizens will no doubt be comfortable using these devices for applications that touch every aspect of their lives, including how they transact business, how they organize and how they collaborate, and that will impact how they interact with government.
We also expect the cloud revolution will be fully implemented by then, including people confidently accessing trusted cloud based applications and data. Consider this not just here but extrapolated to everyone in the world. Everyone on the planet will have access into social networks, ecommerce, cloud based calculation services/algorithms, enhanced education and news and information. Everyone will have this everywhere.
Now that we have done some scene setting, our next post in this series will dive into services the government provides now and in the future and what to expect as citizens become more digitally interactive, with other posts to follow on ways automation, robotics, and AI can impact government service and the social fabric of interactions between citizens and government. Ensure you are on our newsletter distributions to be alerted when we publish.
