Beware The AI Productivity Trap

Cybersecurity (C/S) is a branch of Risk Management, not of Computer Science (CS) or Information Technology (IT). At Pythia Cyber we spend way too much time making that point, mostly to executives who think that they can leave C/S to the IT folks.

But C/S has a big component of applied technology which has led to a long and complicated history of IT techniques and technologies trickling down from IT to C/S. So it is with AI: first AI was used to boost programmer productivity, then it was AI used to make people's emails easier to read and now it is used everywhere for everything all once.

Specifically AI is being used in C/S for a number of functions. We are going to focus on "white hat" uses, in which people are trying to prevent cyber crime, as opposed to "black hat" uses in which people are trying to commit cyber crime.

In the white hat world AI is being used to simulate attacks, probe for weaknesses, automate some monitoring tasks and keep abreast of new patches. These are all legitimate uses, although care is always required to avoid unintended consequences. C/S is lucky to have CS and IT leading the charge so we can get some idea of the costs and risks that come with the benefits and rewards.

One dynamic we would do well to avoid is what I will call "the AI productive trap." I have only anecdotal evidence, but there is enough of that to make me very concerned. The dynamic to which I refer is this:

1. You embrace AI in order to boost productivity.
2. As part of that embrace you encourage your people to integrate AI into all their tasks.
3. The AI(s) learn from this integration.
4. At some point you feel that the AI(s) can do those tasks faster and less expensively*.
5. You lay off employees and rely on the AI(s) instead.

Now you have a diminished workforce with good current capability but reduced ability to create new capability. The people who remain are generally more senior and more skilled. Even if this process doesn't repeat endlessly, moving up the hierarchy, you still have a problem: unless your current senior staff are immortal and perfectly loyal, you will need to replace them some day. Where are those new senior staffers going to come from? The junior staffers who should be on their way to becoming future senior staffers have been laid off.

We are free to pick and choose which IT and CS innovations we adopt in C/S. Let's give this one a miss. Figuring out how to do that is hard. We can help. Ask us how.

* It is far from clear that the true cost of AI will be less than using people. Forbes Magazine, hardly a Socialist news organization, seems to think so.