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In previous posts, I’ve spoken of robots that behave like people, devices that reside within our bodies, the emergence of a ubiquitous network, and other future trends. Mostly I’m looking five to 20 years into the future to try to predict what novel technologies we will one day take for granted. To look much beyond that requires a leap of faith.

Faith in the Singularity

Taking such a leap is futurist Ray Kurzweil, an adherent to the belief that all the technologies we’ve been discussing here at NExTWORK will converge into a whole far greater than the sum of its components, creating a technological Singularity.

The Singularity, like the black holes that give it its name, is the hypothesized point beyond which nothing is observable since it is completely disconnected from our ordinary reality. We can see what goes in (robots, artificial intelligence, implants, networks, and so on), but nothing that might be on the other side. The imagination, then, is one of our few guides when it comes to peering beyond the Singularity. That and faith.

Transhumans in Our Future?

Kurzweil and some other adherents to the idea of the Singularity also believe in what amounts to the technologically based religion of transhumanism. Sooner than you think, goes the this line of thought (by 2029, according to Kurzweil), we will possess the capability to upload to the cloud all of the bits of data that make up our thoughts, our behaviors, our very feelings—in short everything that makes us, us.

Such massive data collection is already underway, as in MIT’s Cognitive Machines director Deb Roy’s project to exhaustively document his son’s development with hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video.

Large datasets such as these, the transhumanists argue, will enable the creation of software that can model our personalities so effectively that interactions with the model will be indistinguishable, at least over the network, from those with the bio version of us.

A Technological Afterlife

Then, says Kurzweil, we will be truly immortal, existing in a technological afterlife; if the virtual me is indistinguishable from the bio me, than it is me. All we have to do now is hold on to this mortal coil long enough to be saved by the coming of the Singularity.

I’m not convinced that I’m the sum total of my behaviors, or that a digital version of me will in fact be me. As Wendall Wallach of Yale’s Bioethics Center said in a panel discussion on transhumanism that I attended not long ago, “Human beings are evolved, biochemical, emotional instruments out of which higher order rational faculties came in a much later stage…really, in the last 50 to 100,000 years. Our rational faculties are not distinct from our emotional beings.” In other words, linear digital processes can’t replicate the chaotic functions of messy biology.

Still, it’s useful to explore the boundaries of just what it is that makes us human, as we try to distill the best of what we discover into the machines we create.

What do you think? Are we approaching the Singularity? And will it one day be possible to upload ourselves into the network?

The Obama White House has named cybersecurity as one of the biggest challenges facing America. And for good reason. Threats from hackers, thieves, hostile governments, and terrorists to our data and information infrastructure are on the rise. A recent report from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center names botnets, hacks to mobile phones, and cyber industrial warfare among the threats we can expect to see more of in 2012.

Social Engineering

Computer hacker-turned-consultant Kevin Mitnick’s fascinating memoir Ghost in the Wires details the ins and outs of cracking computer systems and extracting supposedly secure data.

Tellingly, much of his work involves so-called social engineering to strike at what turns out to be one of the most vulnerable components of any computer system: human users. Those users can be tricked into giving up passwords; old-fashioned snooping can uncover passwords posted near the computers; and a little sleuthing can ferret out personal details that are the common bases of passwords.

Active Authentication

DARPA, the Department of Defense’s out-there research arm, has a new take on identity authentication that could make social engineering by hackers less effective. Why depend on easily compromised passwords, when all we really want to do is verify the identity of an authorized user?

The Active Authentication program, according to a DARPA solicitation, “changes the current paradigm by removing the secret that a human holds, the password, and focuses on the secret that the human specifically is.”

Conventional biometrics, which scan users’ physical features, take too long and are too cumbersome for widespread use. Instead, the DARPA program seeks to analyze a user’s behavior to verify his or her identity. The idea here is to authenticate using software alone, for instance by identifying a user through his or her unique typing pattern or word choices. In this case the user encapsulates the password in his or her unique patterns of behavior.

Palm Reader

For now we’re stuck with more traditional biometrics for verifying users without passwords. Iris scanners have become commonplace at secure areas of airports. They’re more reliable than thumbprint readers, but require a time-consuming pause while a user stares into a reader and holds still long enough to be read; jiggle at just the wrong moment, and you have to start over again.

Fujitu’s PalmSecure system makes the process of identifying a user through physical characteristics easier. Hold your palm in front of the device, and a sensor reads the unique three-dimensional pattern of veins in your hand using near-infrared light. It’s more reliable than fingerprint reading, and less time consuming and awkward than iris scanners.

Whatever methods for authenticating users become standard in the future, authentication is just one piece of the cyber security puzzle that must be solved. Ultimately, in today’s increasingly networked world, cybersecurity is everybody’s business. What steps have you taken to secure your data?