We often overlook things that happen over a long period of time. Sort of like our animal counterparts we fail to notice many things unless they make a sudden movement. One example is computer assisted warfare. Without noticing it we have been using and then allowing computers and robots to assist in killing humans for a very long time. For some reason many people have an image in their heads that a computer killing a person would be a desktop PC reaching out and choking someone to death. But computers are in our cars, planes, and just about every advanced weapon system. Our aircraft were computer controlled, our weapons systems were already being computerized by the time we entered the Korean war. At Bletchley Park UK we had used computers to break the German's Enigma encryption allowing us to read the Germans messages and then kill them at will. It only got worse from there, we used them to calculate targeting of artillery right after that. Computers have been killing and assisting in killing ever since. Our first use of a real computer was to kill, as it is with every advancement in technology, first we must use it for harm. When Dr. Alan Turing killed himself we had our first computer expert' stress related death, it happens with greater regularity every year. Apparently the wages of genius really is madness; perceived or factual, we have limits.
We have also allowed our robotic friends to become ubiquitous without seeing it at all. Our transportation systems, and farming, deep sea exploration, warfare, medical, and all facets of modern life are inundated with these little automated pieces of hardware. When you use a computer to automate some piece of hardware it becomes robotic in nature. It is essentially a series of automated processes in response to some kind of input. When you hit the breaks on a car with anti-lock breaks, the computer is reading sensor information from the wheels. If one of the wheels stops it releases the break pressure slightly until the wheel moves again. It is of course more complex than this. But for brevity's sake we won't delve into the inner workings. Suffice to say, you told the breaks to do something and the computer in the car told the breaks to do something else. You are not fully in charge of the car's breaks anymore. Cruise control is a similar system of automated interactions between computer and car also. The auto pilot on the planes, trains, and ships are all related systems with more sensors giving feedback for safe travel. These are all great, life saving and very highly sought after systems. They are however robotic systems and more are coming, but very little is being done to make sure they are secure from tampering.
Some of these systems are demonstrably insecure, others are untested. There is no cause for alarm, nothing has happened yet. There hasn't been a full scale demonstration of any kind of danger, unless you count Stuxnet and he Iranian nuclear material production facility attack. It has been described in many ways, yet the one most important aspect is unspoken more than not. It was an attack on an isolated, top secret, radioactive, extremely high speed, computer controlled, system. Apparently from remote, and causing some physical destruction. No report of the workers in the facility being killed or not, but radiation certainly has the potential to kill after it has been released. You would think this might set a precedent, and in some ways it does. It isn't often we see people go to such extremes without taking a lot more lives.
By now it should become clear that we have for a long time been very deeply involved in a cyber conflict that we had not realized should be called a cyber conflict. I know many people prefer to call only computer on computer attacks cyber, or computers in the standard desktop verity being the attack vector cyber. I assure you, that the difference between the computers in the office and the CPU in the cruise missile, or Patriot, or even those in aircraft and automobiles are not much great. They obey the same concepts and logic. They process many of the same commands and use similar if not the same programming languages. There is little difference, the same experts who attack your computers at work can attack these automated systems that generate your electricity and provide your water. The danger is in that there are so many skilled in this dark art.
Now we look to the future. There are thousands of small aircraft with camera systems that are controlled over the airwaves. You can manipulate a flying camera from one nation while the aircraft is in another. There is nothing that prevents you from using it for bad except your own ethics. It can have a camera as well as anything else connected to it. It is as easy to report water pollution as it is to assassinate someone. An entire war will be fought with this technology soon. One remote presence begets another and the flying ones will insert the wheeled ones. The floating will launch the flying as well as the submersible. Even though it may not look like a human form, it is essentially a human providing final decision authority and humans are watching from remote locations. There will be no separation between military and civilian in this war. The battles are mostly machine on machine struggling to reach the human controllers. In the future, knowledge truly is power and information is the currency. Of course the future is actually only a few years or less in advance. Our automated drones and advancing technology are becoming as everyday as cell phones and television. Reporters are using them, police are using them, and soon there will be nothing that isn't using them.
A little further into the future and controls are in place for the flying things, but nothing has been able to control the advancing scope of technology. Today a plan stolen is in production within the day.
