Blogpost

by Dr. Marko Niinimaki, faculty member at CSII.

A few years ago a group of skilled engineers in Thong Lor, Bangkok came up with a great new product: a personal cybersecurity defender.

The defender was a small device that anyone with a home or office network could easily plug in. Its main function was to block access to malicious websites. It took care of its updates automatically. If you wanted to limit your access to time wasting social media websites during working hours, there was a friendly interface to do so. Using the same interface you could disable a website blocking (maybe you know it is not harmful after all) or have the device just warn about a site instead of blocking it. The device was not expensive and the technology it used was so fast that you would not notice it inspecting the traffic in your network. This was around the time when ransomware infections were rampant. This will change the world: surely all small business owners and even home users would want such a thing.

Much earlier the computing center of a regional university in Northern Europe had bought a dozen new computers for their computer lab in the basement of the university’s main building. These computers were not PC’s or Macs; they had the Unix operating system that is great for Computer Science students but not very popular with anybody else. While going through my coursework, I noticed an icon on the desktop. The computer center employees had installed a new program called Mosaic on these computers. That kind of program was not yet available for PC’s and Macs. The program was a web browser, one of the very first ones. There were only a few hundred websites at the time, most of them very technical. Yet, I was stunned. This technology is so clever, visual and interactive. This will change the world: In addition to technical content and scientific papers it could be used for .. education!

In 2021 and 2022, within a year, a company called OpenAI released two products: the DALL-E art generator and ChatGPT, a chat bot. Both of them are generative pre-trained transformers. That would have sounded like techno jargon a few years ago but now at our faculty every student knows that generative means it can produce something, pre-trained means it has been trained beforehand (you don’t have to train the model yourself) and the transformer technology is a special kind of neural network that can remember things in their context (the technical term is attention). DALL-E cleverly introduced the technology as a demonstration that can turn a “prompt” (a textual input) into an image. However, for most of us the real introduction to this technology has been chatting with ChatGPT. I think it has already changed the world.

If anyone reads this blog, I’d love to continue in a couple of weeks. In an old textbook I found an interesting prediction of professions that will be gone in the future (meaning: now) due to technological changes. Moreover, was our cheap cyber defense device a success? Was the world wide web mostly used for education? Did I really say “this has no point” when I first saw Facebook?

Read Also: Part II of the blogpost: This changed the world (or not) part 2