I was listening to the podcast Security Weekly and the topic of using AI For security work came up. This got me thinking about how most people make their way into security and what something like AI might mean for the industry.
In virtually every industry you start out doing some sort of horrible job nobody else wants to do, but you have to start there because it's the place you start to learn the skills you need for more exciting and interesting work. Nobody wants to go over yesterday's security event log, but somebody does it.
Now consider this in the context of AI. AI can and will parse the event logs faster and better than a human ever could. We're terrible at repetitive boring tasks. Computers are awesome at repetitive boring tasks. It might take the intern two hours to parse the log files, it will take the log parser two seconds. And the computer won't start thinking about donuts halfway through. Of course there are plenty of arguments how today's AI have problems which is true. They're still probably better than humans though.
But here is what really got me thinking. As more and more of this work moves to the domain of AI and machines, what happens to the entry level work? I'm all for replacing humans with robots, without getting into the conversation about what will all the humans do when the robots take over, I'm more interested in entry level work and where the new talent comes from.
For the foreseeable future, we will need people to do the high skilled security work. By definition most of the high skilled people are a bit on the aged side. Most of us worked our way up from doing something that can be automated away (thank goodness). But where will get our new batch of geezers from? If there are no entry level offering, how can security people make the jump to the next level? I'm sure right now there are a bunch of people standing up screaming "TRAINING", but let's face it, that only gets you a little way there, you still need to get your hands dirty before you're actually useful. You're not going to trust a brain surgeon who has never been in an operating room but has all the best training.
I don't have any answers or even any suggestions here. It just happened to get me thinking. It's possible automation will follow behind the geezers which would be a suitable solution. It's possible we'll need to make some token entry level positions just to raise the skill levels.
What do you think? @joshbressers