Cyber Social Work

Cyber Social Work is/will be about helping people to keep the cyber/digital aspects of their lives healthy. Like a digital/cyber-focused strand of social work.

For example, being safe online – from financial loss, identity misuse, harassment, privacy breaches; particularly for people in groups identified as especially vulnerable to such threats (seniors, people with low digital literacy etc.).

Develop the ability to detect scams/frauds by understanding reliable trust indicators and how to verify them. To detect/investigate/verify the trustworthiness of information found online. Support digital literacy and safety efforts.

This is part of the natural evolution of thoughts/concerns around Public Interest Technology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Tech for Social Good, and niche ideas like Cyber GP clinics.

The Digital Safety Support volunteer role being proposed to COPE Galway could be considered an example of cyber social work.

The term ‘Cyber Social Work’ is also present in some discussions where it means ‘using digital tools to deliver social work’. But I’m imagining/meaning it as ‘social work for the digital/cyber health/welfare/wellbeing of people’.

Imagining: Cyber GP Clinics

Viewing cybersecurity similar to public health is something I appreciate.

Following that line of thought, Cyber GPs (Cyber General Practitioners, like Medical GPs/Doctors) – something like “Cyber Clinics” or “Cyber GP Clinics” or “Cyber Physician’s Clinics” make sense.

Especially for small enterprises. Because, a large percentage of small enterprises are participating in the digital transformation revolution with little to no guidance, understanding, or assurance.

They cannot stay on top of their IT/digital requirements on their own. They need someone to whom they can ask questions and get remedies to their cyber/tech/digital situations.

Currently, it is managed IT service providers (MSPs) or managed security service providers (MSSPs) who fulfil this requirement. This could be considered analogous to relying on pharmacies for your medical needs – where pharmacists are the only advisories and their recommendations (prescriptions) of various over-the-counter drugs/pharmaceutical products are what the SMEs can use.

This leaves a gap where some public/independent entity should take charge of establishing vendor-agnostic standards and suggestions, to ensure the community (tech/cyber)-health of small enterprises (or even individuals).

Aeronautical engineering vs Software engineering: The maturity of the digitally transformed world

Immediate context: ‘the largest IT outage in history’ the global IT outage that happened on 18th and 19th July 2024, due to issues arising from a cybersecurity software used by large enterprises across the world (CrowdStrike), and the Windows operating system. This led to the disruption to normal daily activities across the world: cancelled and grounded flights, disrupted medical processes and more.

The incident has rightly been described as “showing the fragility of the digitally connected world”.

Take the aviation sector, for instance. Aviation could be considered as one of the most safety-critical engineering/technology domain. The mechanical (and electronic and electrical) engineering involved in aviation is grounded in mature safety principles like redundancy, fail-safes, fail-overs, bypass, fault tolerance, fault isolation, and such. The internet-involved software-based computer technology (“the digital world”) is still a long way away from such levels of safety/security maturity.

The CrowdStrike+Windows incident juxtaposes the maturity of aviation engineering and the immaturity of digital engineering.

What’s the takeaway?

Firstly, it’s to be acknowledged that there are fundamental weaknesses in the “digital ecosystem”. It’s not a mature field like civil, mechanical, or electrical engineering.

It’s time to stop treating the digital revolution or digital transformation like a gold rush, and to instead invest in the maturing and careful understanding of the technology and systems involved.

Ethics on Chip

Ethics on Chip – to be read like the ‘System on Chip’ (SoC) in electronics.

What’s it?

An electronic, hardware-level element/module that sits on the circuitry of electronic devices – smartphones, computers – which ensures that those devices remain protected from being used unethically.

For example, in the case of training machine language models, and running recommendation, prediction, suggestion, decision models.

Think about Ethics on Chip (EoC) along the lines of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) by the Trusted Computing Group, and Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). It’s like an ASIC for ethics – an integrated circuit to embed ethics into electronic devices.

This idea/thought emerged while engaging with the topic of ethical AI and trustworthy AI, and the broader discussions about AI and society. It is also an example of Applied Public Interest Technology.