As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially.
Interpretation
The increasing reliance on technology in daily life amplifies our vulnerabilities to security threats.
David E. Sanger's quote highlights the growing dependence on technology and the potential dangers that come with it. As we integrate more smart devices into our homes and make our lives increasingly digital, we simultaneously expose ourselves to greater risks, such as hacking and privacy breaches. The ease and convenience afforded by these technologies may come at a significant cost to our personal security.
In practice
During a tech conference discussing cybersecurity, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of secure practices.
Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.
We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.
What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.
The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many.
I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.
Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.
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