Securing Artificial Intelligence Before It Secures Us!

Since I spend an inordinate and unfortunate amount of time worrying about the possibility of a forthcoming artificial intelligence (AI) apocalypse, I was delighted to hear that the folks at ETSI have plunged into the fray with regard to establishing the world's first standardization initiative dedicated toward securing AI. We will return to ETSI's initiative shortly, but first… To be honest, things are now happening so fast with regard to AI that it's starting to make my head spin (see also What the FAQ are AI, ANNs, ML, DL, and DNNs?). As I've mentioned before, AI has been long in the coming. Way back in the 1840s, Ada Lovelace, who was assisting Charles Babbage on his quest to build a mechanical computer called the Analytical Engine, jotted down some thoughts about the possibility of computers one day using numbers as symbols to represent other things like musical notes. In 1950, a little over 100 years after Ada penned her musings, English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist, Alan Mathison Turing wrote a seminal paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he considered the question, "Can Computers Think?"