Demand for highly desirable digital skills is hitting new heights. A recent Learning and Work Institute report noted that one in four (27%) employers now need the majority of their workers to have in-depth specialist knowledge in one or more technology areas. And 60% of those surveyed expect their reliance on advanced digital skills to increase over the next five years. The skills gap is particularly prevalent in the security tech sector. A global study from the Center for Cyber Safety and Education predicted a terrifying shortage of 1.8 million security workers by 2022.

I was reminded of a mathematical hypothesis called the singularity when I read Vinod Khosla's recent interview in the Wall Street Journal and his prediction of massive job displacement and the growth of new industries due to the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). The singularity is a point and phase in the future when bio, nano, energy, robotic, and computer technology will develop at such a rate, become so advanced, and have such a profound impact on humanity, that today's society has no means to understand or describe what life will be like at that time in the future. It made me wonder how far and fast we are heading in the same explosion of unfathomable change occurring today in information security. Just as IT revolutionized all forms of business in the last half-century, and the Internet in turn revolutionized IT in the last quarter-century, the trajectory we are on now places AI squarely at the next technology inflection point. The study of history often provides a strong predictor of human societal change.