For cybersecurity specialists working in the federal government, the flood of artificial intelligence tools in recent years has had a transformative effect on the work of agencies.
In these relatively nascent days, some federal cyber officials have said they believe AI provides more of an advantage for defenders that attackers in cyberspace, while others warn that the the pace of innovation appears to be a threat for the country.
But from a workforce perspective, agency cyber experts say the worst fears about AI replacing humans will not come true.
Speaker at a university research center in advanced technologies event Last week, on smart data and cyber resilience, federal IT leaders delivered a clear message to the cyber workforce: “Automation will not replace humans,” said Amy Hamilton, senior advisor. in cybersecurity for Department of Energy policies and programs.
“What this is going to do is enable us and make it better.” Every time I see the cybersecurity workforce statistics, believe me, there is more than enough work to be done. Don’t worry if your work moves away from AI. AI will simply be your personal assistant and help you even more.
Hamilton, who previously served as a cybersecurity policy analyst at the Office of Management and Budget, noted the Breach of 2021 of a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, as an example of the need for human intervention. An Oldsmar plant operator reported the issue of dangerous levels of sodium hydroxide before they are released into the system.
“It turned out someone was watching it, and they noticed it and stopped the chemicals from entering” the system, Hamilton said. “We need to make sure we put all the checks and balances in place.”
Although later reports questioned whether an outside hacker actually responsible for the Oldsmar incidentHamilton’s view on the importance of continued monitoring remains.
“One of the characteristics of sites that are primarily operational technology based is that they are designed for a switchover to a manual mode, and a lot of people say ‘automate, automate,'” she said. “You can do that, but is there a lot of risk?” By having humans monitoring these systems as well as what we’ve been talking about about the importance of automation, that will come into play.”
In DOEs 16-page AI inventoryfour use cases use robotic processing automation, while another from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory leverages automation and robotics to “accelerate hardware development and interpretation of sensor data to improve reliability process “.
Alyssa Feola, a cybersecurity advisor at the General Services Administration, also expressed concern about the removal of humans from the cyber workforce. Leaving all system reviews to AI tools could lead to “really tainted things,” she said.
“We need these people to do this work,” Feola said. “We’re not going to automate the elimination of these jobs, because it’s going to take people to do the work, and I think that’s what’s really most important.”
Working with AI in federal agencies is just one part of the current technological evolution that government and society as a whole are experiencing. These “new challenges” require a lot of work, Hamilton said, but there is really only one path forward.
“Now we have to change the way we think and as older people we have to be much more open to the next generation and open up these concepts because technology is going to continue to evolve,” she said. “We have to change with this.”
