The majority of conversations I’ve had recently have been centered around AI. Many conversations are about how to hack AI or how to better orchestrate AI systems. It’s all very exciting, but take a day off and you risk the industry leaving you behind.
For every conversation I have about unique projects people are creating, there are a dozen other conversations I’m having with people who feel extremely uneasy about all of this.
In the beginning, the conversations were about AI being no more than fancy autocomplete (a phrase I’ve long disliked) and LLMs being useless for any serious security work because of the risk of hallucinations. I understand why someone who isn’t spending a significant amount of time using these tools can come to that conclusion, and early models were plagued with problems.
Today, almost everyone (in this wonderful tech bubble you, dear reader, exist) has moved to a different level of anxiety about AI. There are two reasons for this I want to touch on.
The anxiety now is that it’s too much. Too much to keep up with, too much to compete against. Too much to learn. Too much to bid against. Too much to ask of one person to drop everything they’re doing to “learn AI”.
To understand what is different we can look at the rise of cloud computing. It was a colossal industry shift that changed how businesses do business. It dramatically shifted what skills are relevant, and added a new domain security professionals need to spend their already limited bandwidth on.
The ramp up time companies and individuals had to acquire these new skills was measured in decades. Amazon S3 was launched 20 years ago last month. There was a decade of gradual build up that allowed people to learn about this new technology at their own pace. If you didn’t pay attention for a day… nothing happened. You didn’t miss anything. You weren't afraid you'd miss 22 releases from AWS tweaking how S3 worked.
Today we are not so fortunate. The speed at which things are changing has gone from months, to weeks, to days.
Cloud computing did not affect every industry overnight. In 2006 a lawyer did not know what S3 was. An accountant was not worried about S3 having serious consequences on their job role. A security engineer was probably actually hired because of it.
AI is different. Every day the big 3 AI firms are pushing out tools trying to directly compete with law firms, cybersecurity companies, and web designers. All at once.
No one has a crystal ball, but cybersecurity has always been a winner take most field. The best in the field have way more job opportunities than those who are just working their 9-5. It seems AI is supercharging that mindset. Those who can spend the time, tokens, and mental effort to invest in these new tools seem to be pulling away from their peers.
No one knows the implications of this, but there is no world in which knowing less is better than knowing more. The hard part is triaging the information and taking action on it without it becoming overwhelming. If you can do that, you'll come out ok.
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