Many nations are understandably concerned about being left behind in AI development and are spending considerable effort trying to enter the AI market. However, they will never match the money that flows into American AI companies. Rather than attempting to compete directly with the US approach, I believe there’s a better path: do something different. Reflex provides a way to capture the activities of people working through incident response and potentially create models that were not possible before—from data that is being created in real-time, not from scraping existing data from somewhere else. This represents a fundamentally different approach to AI development that doesn’t require competing on the same playing field as the tech giants.

Related Topics

Below Are some ideas about how nations with strong technological infrastructure can leverage their resources to assist neighboring developing countries through coordinated security and technology initiatives.

When thinking about world affairs, I have the following observations about the potential use of the Reflex platform:

Information Security Coordination

Information security involves a diverse number of skills. In the US, companies do not cooperate or share information about experiences with information security. Each company must maintain their own staff of experts. I imagine that in smaller nations, statistically, there can only be so many information security experts.

To these nations, I would suggest an official incident response department of the government that coordinates the information security activities of companies that want to participate. Reflex was designed to work with consulting companies that manage the incident response of their customers. Having all the required expertise available through a government-sponsored organization would be the most efficient way to manage a limited supply of experts.

As stated in previous posts, if every organization followed a standard taxonomy, then this official government organization could create response plans and define incidents. Having a central location would also allow recognition of patterns for things like new virus outbreaks. This is nothing that could work in the US, but in other nations it is something worth considering.

Emergency Response Applications

There are many situations where plans are needed. Anywhere there’s an emergency—schools, hospitals—could be provided with emergency assistance through plans or other resources. Having a central hub for organizations that help would allow the government to get a good understanding of exactly what was occurring and possibly spot patterns before they are recognized by traditional means.

Opportunity for Developing Nations

I’ve also given thought to developing nations that depend on things like call centers to create employment opportunities. It’s well-known that AI is being considered as a replacement for this type of outsourcing. Reflex offers the opportunity for what would essentially be considered remote project management.

I wrote up a proposal for the mayor of Boston suggesting this for disadvantaged individuals as a way to enter the field of information security without any particular expertise. I believe there would be a market for people who are essentially in charge of making sure other people follow up on their responsibilities.

For example, there are many companies that offer information security solutions that are geared toward detecting some kind of condition. Once that condition is detected, it needs to be communicated to someone, and then someone else has to follow up on its resolution. Someone working in one of these project management organizations would learn valuable skills and could lead to an entirely new category of outsourced information security.

The truth is, most of what we do is not rocket science, and the biggest mistakes made are usually in following up or dropping the ball. It seems to me that this may be a good opportunity to provide nations with another potential source of employment.

Perspective on AI Claims

All I can say is that there have been a lot of claims about the jobs AI is going to take, and an enormous amount of it is just hype. There are companies like Microsoft that claim to be laying off people because of AI. They claim a high percentage of their code is being written by AI. I can say from first-hand experience that every AI is terrible at writing code. AI can easily reproduce code that’s already been written—it’s virtual cut-and-paste to an AI. But I’ve had no luck with any of the AIs figuring out better ways to help with my projects.

I’m not an expert on the subject, but it seems like they may actually be able to replace some call center-type positions. The nations that depend on the labor of other countries seeking cheap labor can expect that AI will have a negative effect on them. I would need to know more about the way these nations work before I can architect a potential solution, but I am willing to work with anyone who recognizes the value of long-term partnerships.