The future is "Siri & Clyde", one of the world's most sought after Global Security experts, Marc Goodman revealed, at his exclusive event last night at the fittingly futuristic workspace of London's Second Home: the Utopian digs of Blasting News UK. You're probably familiar with Pedro Bravo, the 20-year-old student who endorsed Siri as his newly improved accomplice for advice on how to hide his roommate's body: 'Reservoirs, dumps, or mines', the robotic Bonnie advised his human Clyde…and so it goes, whether we like to admit it or not, man and machine have become interdependent.
As exceptional as this incident may seem, our FBI Futurist and Founder of the Future Crimes Institute informed us that the "ominous flipside" to our bright technological future is, in fact, "the new normal". Take Facebook. Raise your hand if you're a Facebook customer, Goodman humoured us, to which the entire audience naturally raised their hands.
Wrong: You're a Facebook product. We pay for the "free" service with our data; Facebook's Chief Security Officer has revealed that the Big Data Giant is hacked 600,000 times a day, and yet we continue to wear "pleaserobme.com" - a site that actually exists - on our Facebook foreheads. We are off to the sunshine, the Rottweiler is in the kennels and, by the way, the code to the safe is written under the fridge.
Indeed, it is in screen we trust, as we walk willingly into the dark web which we ourselves have woven, making us, as Goodman announced with an ironic half-smile: "The largest unpaid workforce in the history of the world". At this, a roar of laughter swept through the audience; and yet, I couldn't help but wonder how much of their nervous jest was at the expense of the self, for on clocking Goodman's shocking statistic that 78% of burglars under the age of 30 use social media to locate their targets, I knew mine certainly was.
In his new book Future Crimes Goodman, in his own words, 'takes people into that future". Organised Crime Groups - Ukraine's 'Innovative Marketing Solutions' to name one - yield billions, our expert informed us last night, with incentives of brand spanking new lambos, and suitcases packed full with euros, for the lucky employee who proposes the best hack.
Perhaps even more disturbing, robots can be hacked. The GPS control of Google's self-driving car is a hacker's dream, Goodman warns: at what kidnapping scene might passengers end up? For those who have been sceptical of recent A.I. warnings from Steven Hawking and others, our Senior Advisor to Interpol confirms that it is indeed imminent. "We've wired the world, but we've failed to secure it, we've set ourselves up for disaster", said Goodman, "The Internet broke Policing".
Among the tragedies of exponential technology, however, Goodman's contagious good humour delivered us some much needed comic relief. "Stop going online", was his playful recommendation while, in his Bio Crime description of someone taking your DNA from your used glass in a bar, and planting it at a crime scene, he ironically took a sip from the glass handed to him.
Goodman is optimistic: we can fix these problems by educating ourselves, he urges. Have a "natural curiosity" about your Smartphone, follow Goodman's steps to prevent Future Crime which will "reduce your cyber risk by 85%", and in doing so, become technologically literate in Siri & Clyde: "A brighter technological future can be ours" is Goodman's message, "but it won't be ours for free".
