 And welcome to Figments on Reality. I'm Dan Leif and I go by Fig, that's the name of this show. It's season one, episode two. Now, those are totally arbitrary designations. I don't know how I'll define a season, but it just sounds cool. So I do it. And as you can see today's episode, we're gonna talk about good and evil in cyberspace. But first, let's talk about what I'm trying to do here so you know what to expect if you haven't seen it before. This is gonna be a non-political discussion and I'm gonna try to avoid vitriol. Okay, I have an aversion to politics, they're important and I exercised my politics at the ballot box, but I'd like to give you things to think about, not what to think. So if you have alternate views or wanna disagree or have a debate, drop me a line at info at phase-1.com and we can have a conversation. So today on episode two, I'm gonna start a new feature on Figments on Reality called Come On, Man on Reality. From the news, I'll find stories that just make me roll my eyes and say, come on, man. Yes, I did take this from a popular NFL pre-game show, but I think it still works here. So my first Come On, Man comes from the Chinese government saying that Japan was playing politics by providing much needed vaccines, COVID vaccines to the island of Taiwan. Now, since China claims Taiwan as a province and as part of their territory and the US and the world community have largely acceded to that view, why aren't they providing vaccines? And who's playing politics? If you look at the Chinese use of vaccines of some questionable effectiveness across the globe, they're the ones playing politics. So come on, man, get real. The other Come On, Man for today comes from a public service announcement that I recently saw that said that there are already more disposable masks, COVID type masks in the ocean than jellyfish. Now, first of all, we ought to be careful about how we dispose of everything that might go in the ocean, including masks. And we try to limit our use here at home and break the strings on them so they don't get entangled in sea life if they wind up in the ocean. But how do they know, first of all, how many jellyfish there are in the ocean? Who counted them? And furthermore, how do they know how many masks are in the ocean? So yeah, like I said, I agree with the concept, let's keep stuff out of the ocean that doesn't belong in the ocean, but who makes this stuff up? And that's what it is made up. And I don't know if that's fake news or made up news, but it's not helpful to use hyperbole that simply can't be supported scientifically. And I say it can't because of my own experience with jellyfish. There's a lake in Palau, and this comes from my travel experience, Jellyfish Lake, it's on the small island of Eli Malk in Palau. And I went there a few years ago during my travel with the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies and went to Jellyfish Lake. And they put you on a boogie board and it's kind of face down, actually you're on an inflatable life jacket so you don't sink into the jellyfish. And the guide directs you to swim in a certain direction and the guidance was really exactly this. The swim in this direction until you see a hundred jellyfish, then keep going. When you see a thousand jellyfish, keep going. When you see a million jellyfish, you're there and just stop and enjoy the view. Millions of golden jellyfish migrate across this lake every day according to Wikipedia. And of course we believe Wikipedia. So how do we know how many millions of jellyfish there are in the ocean? I don't know, come on man, don't make stuff up, make your point without Maloney. So that's come on man, on reality for today. I'll tell you in a bit why I thought we'd make this Cyber Monday on pigments. But first of all, we had a family discussion last night over dinner, Alejandra and Alejo and I were talking about the good and evil cyberspace and how it influences it. And I've got my notes from it, but it was such a far ranging discussion, really good as always, that I won't go into detail, but there is good and evil in cyberspace. To understand that, I guess I should define cyberspace by the way I see it. And it's really this digital environment where we can do lots of things, some good and some evil. One of the first things we have is connectivity, both as individuals and collectively Facebook, social media. It really goes beyond that email. All of the ways you can connect with people, with companies, with your interests are truly remarkable and generally positive. Another area that the cyberspace has changed human life is the access to information, some of it real. But you can find anything you need. I don't take on a home improvement project without finding a video on YouTube that tells you how to do it. Why learn the hard lessons if somebody's already learned them. And we built a fence yesterday, a little privacy fence on our property. I should say Alejo built it. You did an awesome job, but it started with research on the web. So you can find how to build something, how to cook something, how to buy something, all there in a manner with accessibility that simply did not exist in years gone by. And I think that's good. You can express yourself personally. I'm doing that right now. I mean, 20 years ago, I couldn't have had a show like this without the cyberspace presence of ThinkDec Hawaii, a great organization. And I couldn't have gotten out and shared my views with you now, some of those views that are shared are frankly hateful and thus evil. So it's not all good, but we have a chance to express our views in ways that we didn't have. But the one that caught my mind in the reason that I'm talking about good and evil and cyberspace today is an article I found from Newsweek online about drastic. You can see what drastic is there. The decentralized radical autonomous search team investigating COVID-19. Now they weren't always called that and it's not as formal, it's not an organization. It's a collective, if you will, of interested parties, researchers, cybersluce and other folks who were curious about the origins of the COVID-19 virus. And sharing through Twitter, they got a cyber collective established and shared ideas and accessed information available online. And as you can see, Newsweek says that they kind of shamed the mainstream media into looking more deeply and giving more credibility to the potential that the virus came out of the Chinese lab in Wuhan. Now, I don't know if it did or not. I'm not advocating that views, but it is plausible. And it was largely dismissed for a long time until this crowd dug into things, including Chinese data in published research papers that they found in a Chinese website. Despite the official party denials that it could possibly emanated from the lab, there were papers that showed both by the nature of the virus and the actions that were and weren't taken that it might have. I really recommend that you look at that Newsweek article and read the detail because it shows how they laboriously sought the information translated and correlated it on Twitter of all things and built now an organization that has a bit more structure. And as you've seen in the past week, that's making the mainstream media, the traditional media look more closely at this theory. Again, I'm not advocating a conclusion. I'm just saying that this group, drastic through hard work and cyber slow thing they could only do in our digital environment can change the thinking. And an issue that's very important if we're going to avoid such pandemics in the future. My goodness, I certainly hope we are able to avoid those. The next topic I'd like to talk about. So read that article. I highly recommend it. Newsweek doesn't pay me. This is a non-commercial show is hopefully you know, at least I don't think I'm getting paid for it. But the next area of interest to me in cyberspaces, the evil side of it and it has to do with systems control and data acquisition. Yes, I did look down at my notes to make sure I got that right. It's normally called SCADA. It's a SCADA is a collection of software and hardware that enables processes like managing a pipeline, for example, or running a plant or organizing stop lights. So that in theory, they're sequentially green, et cetera to make traffic flow better. Then they're used on small and grand scales throughout the world. And really it was probably one of the first major, first manifestations of our digital environment in the evolution of cyberspace. The problem is that SCADA systems and the hardware and software are vulnerable to attack. And we've seen that lately. And the first one I'll talk about is the colonial pipeline attack, which is back in the news again. And in the colonial pipeline attack, this is a huge pipeline, I had no idea. It takes the fuel, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel all the way from Texas as far northeast as New York. And about 45% of the fuel consumed on the east coast of the United States is shipped by the colonial pipeline as you probably are aware. This pipeline and its SCADA systems suffered a ransomware attack that impacted the SCADA management of it. And the colonial pipeline company had to halt all of the pipeline's operations to contain the attack. Now, why was this done? Was this some nefarious nation state trying to hurt the United States? No, it was for money. And that's what the attackers have said. They did it for money. They requested and received a ransomware or a ransom of $4.4 million, I think in Bitcoin, within several hours of the attack. They sent, the hackers sent the colonial pipeline folks a software fix. It worked very slowly, but life, not just fuel, but life on the east coast was significantly impacted for days. And you can imagine if it were longer or let's say they mis-engineered their fix and the pipeline didn't come back up. That has great importance to your average person on the street, but it also has national security importance to it. The good news is that I just saw a headline, I haven't read beyond this, that the government has retrieved $2 million of the $4.4 million ransom that was paid. So hack number one, actually one of many, but one of the most visible ones. The second hack shows the global nature of both economy and cyberspace. JBS, a meatpacking company headquartered in Brazil, serves over 110 countries, largest meatpacking company in the world. Well, they were targeted in late May as well. And that's shut down slaughterhouses from Australia to Canada to the U.S. stood down over 10,000 workers, basically put them temporarily out of work and will continue to affect meat supply. And if you wonder about second order or cascading effects, it's likely to drive meat prices up and supply down in Hawaii as the effects ripple down the supply chain. So that affects everybody. Again, mostly a personal economic impact, but with potential national security implications over time. I don't just say that. The FBI director, Christopher Ray, said that the agency is investigating over a hundred different kinds of malware, ransomware throughout. And he compared, if we could go back to slide four, he compared these attacks to the threat posed by 9-11. And said that this is a shared responsibility countering these ransomware attacks, shared responsibility, not just across government agencies, but across the private sector and even the average American. I'd kind of put that in reverse order. It starts with the average American. You can't buy food for your family because the shelves are bare. That's kind of where it starts, but then the responsibility goes to the businesses to protect themselves from ransomware and build safeguards into the system, to the government to inform businesses of the threat that's out there and enable their response to them as much as possible. But let's take director Ray's comments a little more. This is 9-11. I was in the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. Maybe I'll talk about that more some other time. And I saw the response and it was a military response. So if this is that big a threat, does that mean at some point, a nation, the United States or another nation will have to execute a military response against a non-state ransomware attack? In other words, something the meatpacking hack was attributed to Russian private hackers with maybe the government looking the other way. But as a regular, a real kinetic, nasty, violent, ugly war start from cyber crime? Worth considering and not in a question that has a myriad of not just legal implications but moral implications, then I'll throw in a word from my conscience and say that I think it's become too easy to find reasons to apply military force. And I regret that more on that, maybe again, some other time. But really is the United States going to execute a cyber or other attack against a non-state malware provider? I don't know. We need to think about that. So let's take a breath, take a break because I will get back to good that they're in cyberspace. In a second, let me give a word for my other show. Alternating weeks, we have pigments, the power of imagination. And in the next show, a week from today at 2 p.m. white time, the day being Monday the 7th June, I'm sorry, I know these are often viewed after the fact. I'll have my great friend, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Bard retired, Greg Slick Aguirre. One of the best pilots ever and certainly one of the most pilots in terms of flying and what he's flown ever. He dreamt he could fly and fly and flying. You'll hear his amazing and very humble story next week on pigments, the power of imagination. So next let's talk about artificial intelligence, something that is very powerful, a notion that's very powerful, machines that learn, that learn like humans, from humans that could take over the world perhaps. And there is some fear of the role of artificial intelligence, but it can be good as well. And it's best artificial intelligence in my experience, when it's used to enable human magic. I don't, maybe I'm naive, I don't think so, but I don't believe that machines or artificial intelligence are able to or intended to replace humans. I do think they can enable human magic, because the magic and we see it every day and the people we meet, people we see on TV or whatever, we see the magic of the human mind. And I don't think you can zero and one that into digital form. I do think that artificial intelligence can learn. Let me give you an example from my experience about how I think artificial intelligence should be used. Believe it or not, for a couple of years, I was a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board as a retired Air Force guy. And at that time, a defense industry executive. And it was that there were 40 people on this board, all of them smarter than me, scientists, engineers, really brilliant people trying to help the Air Force solve its problem. I was there to provide comic relief, I think. Remarkable organization and we would do summer studies where all of these unpaid volunteers could get together and look at a tough problem. One summer, we looked at a problem that was kind of data driven and I can't go into detail, but the problem was folks in the military had access to so much data that they needed to assess and act upon in real time that they were swamped by it. And there was a technological solution of sorts to it. But what I witnessed, what I found, was that the solution was intended to enable the machine. The approach, the fundamental approach that the engineers and acquisition community had taken was, well, let's make the machines work better. No, let's make the machines, and the humans were there to enable the machines working better. And in my mind, that's the reverse of how it should work. Free up the humans from tasks that they don't do or don't do well to apply their reason, their rationale and their morality to make good decisions quickly. And there's no way, and so I think that's the good of artificial intelligence. And it can be used that way. And I think there's no endeavor where it has more potential than in education and learning. And if you've seen figments on reality, season one, episode one, and I've commented on it, otherwise, I was not a good learner. I had trouble learning. And that's because we all learn differently. And the traditional way of teaching didn't reach me. No, some of it was because I was a knucklehead as a young person, maybe still now, but a lot of it was that the mode didn't fit the way I learned. And I think I can learn stuff since then. So I work for an adaptive learning company as a paid senior advisor. And this is the disclaimer. This is not a commercial for the company that I think very highly of. It's for the thinking of using artificial intelligence to enable that human magic in the learning environment. The company is called Serigo. It's a memory management and adaptive learning company. Google it, you're not gonna buy directly from it because that's not how they work. They provide their learning platform right now to institutions of higher education, to businesses that have to train or educate, and the area that I work in, government and military. And it's being used in teaching folks who are learning dentistry or neuroscience, as well as how to run the high speed rail system in Japan or how to fly F-15E fighters in the US Air Force. So it can be used to teach anything. And the reason it's so powerful is that it employs artificial intelligence end to end from creating the learning material to presenting it and refreshing it to assessing how well somebody learned. I think that's pretty good. And it's something that frankly, a teacher can't do, but it can enable the magic of both the learner and the instructor. And I've got one quick slide that shows you how they do it. And again, not a commercial, I just like it. In the traditional way of learning, you get all the information presented in a class through lectures and books. And if you study really hard, okay, that was not my skill. Initially, you reach a peak of what you know, but it fades really, really quickly. That black curve, it just fades dramatically 80% in a very short time down to near nothing. But using artificial intelligence and cognitive science, the really bright scientists and engineers at Sergo found that they could watch how somebody learns and not just did they get the question right or wrong, but when will they, how long will they remember it? And when will they forget it? And the key to that is they learned that they learned that when you learn something, as it's fading from your memory, there's a point of desirable difficulty that line you see in the middle of the chart. And if you retrieve the information that you still kind of remember, just as it's fading from your mind, you'll retain it longer next time and so on and so forth. And that's what Sergo does. Again, not a commercial, but it's pretty magic because you learn better, but you retain about four times as much. That's shown in some of the studies. The beauty of it is it takes half the time. And time is money and so you learn faster and better and it feels better because we all learn differently. So my friend Ross Roly who I had on Figments, the power of imagination. Last week, a mathematician, a great student, he's going to learn differently than I will. He'll get bored if he has to go at my pace. I'll get overwhelmed if I have to go at his pace. And this approach using artificial intelligence and puts us at our own pace and the learning feels better. Now that's some artificial intelligence magic. It also provides, and this gets into an area that we should all be concerned about, potential risk from artificial intelligence because we can provide, because it looks at millions of not jellyfish, millions of elements of how you're learning a topic, where you get some real insight into the learning capability and the retention of an individual student or a collective group. Group on the plus side that enables a professor and instructor, a trainer, teacher to know how folks are doing, know what they're struggling with, put the classroom emphasis or the one-on-one emphasis on the areas that are troublesome and recognize, okay, they've got that and leave it alone and not waste their time with it. But you get a lot of insight into the individuals with it. So I think artificial intelligence and the cyber stuff in learning and education is very powerful and something that can revolution how well we all learn regardless of our modes of learning. So cyberspace, good and evil, they're both out there and the risks are clear, but the benefits are mirrored as well. I have forgotten the last couple of shows to address what would FIG do because we're talking Cyber Monday FIG would be real careful. And I am about what I share online about the security systems and programs that I have about using two-factor identification. But remember two-factor identification doesn't always work. I did a webcast or a webinar rather for the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum last week on the attack on Midway. And many of you know the Japanese code was broken but they knew where they were going. But the Japanese in a cryptological sense had two-factor authentication and double encrypted the dates and time. But guess what? The Americans figured that out too and knew not just where but when. So check your security, be careful, change your passwords, all those things, please. Well, that passed quickly in a cyber flash if you will. I hope you found it informative. I thank, as always, ThinkTek Hawaii, a great organization for the over 20 years for hosting our shows. And they are a non-profit. Go to ThinkTekHawaii.com and see how you can support with the donation, big or small. They need your help to do their wonderful work and give so many voices in cyberspace to the Hawaiian community and really around the world. Please join me Monday for Figments, The Power of Imagination. And Dr. Slickagiri had dreamt he could fly and fly and fly and he did. So mahalo and aloha. Thank you.