Shoham - Collapsing Technologies
Healing our technological self-destruction
By Eh'den Biber
Dedicated to Shoham
Prologue – Shoham (1997)
Shoham was the beautiful gift my ex-wife and I received after the death of our second son. I remember our happiness when she came into the world and the shock that hit us less than 24 hours later when her doctors realised something is *really* wrong with her body. The doctors did everything they could – they made her pass endless tests, they created a committee with the best experts in the hospital and consulted with colleagues around the country and the world. She was given every treatment they can think of - but nothing helped. I remember a conversation I had with the head of the emergency unit for newborn babies, a kind and gentle man, who told me during that week: “You know, we doctors are good plumbers. We can change valves, and pipes, but when the system is collapsing we don't have any ability to fix it”.
I set next to her bed day and night for seven days, saw her dying in front of my eyes, until she passed away.
Metabolism
My daughter died due to a rare metabolism disorder. Metabolism comes from Greek word "change", and is the set of life-sustaining chemical transformations within the cells of living organisms. These reactions allow organisms to grow and reproduce, maintain their structures, and respond to their environments. When system is unable to grow, reproduce, response to the environment and maintain structure it dies.
Like Shoham, the human race has a serious metabolism problem. Life on this planet has us, humans, in control, and look what we do to our planet and to each other.
Wealth distribution is becoming more and more uneven, our growth is sustained by destroying our planet, and whenever anyone tries to fix the problem it makes it even worse. Education systems are being used to brainwash and subjugate people so they will have no sense of awareness – not only by the hands of extremist who fight hate freedom but also by our own “democratic” systems who do just the same. Our education systems are build to create a state of unawareness. Don't take my word, read “The Underground History of American Education” by John Taylor Gatto who won multiple awards for his work as an educator before he decided to quit because he couldn't hurt kids anymore.
In the western world we have abandoned our quest for wisdom and replaced it (or being lured into replacing it) with knowledge and technology addiction (as I've written in my previous post, “Dancing with Faust”). Lack of awareness is the root cause of all the human race problems, and like in the case of my daughter, it is being represented in the cellular level, which is in this case individual human beings – you and I.
To understand the relationship between the two I recommend on reading “The Biology of Belief – Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles” by Bruce Lipton.
Collapsing Information Security
Because information systems are part of our human experience, they are sick like we are. Like the doctors who treated my daughter, we in information security try to solve our problems by having more knowledge and bigger data, and by using whatever technology we have to protect information assets. Like in the case of Shoham, we fail, and our “patient” is dying in front of our eyes.
Like the doctors in the hospital who started with the basic treatment and basic blood tests and later on expanded them into endless blood tests and every medical procedure they could think of, we moved from compliance to anti-virus to firewalls and now, in our current state of affairs we are in the promised land of Bayesian algorithms, which is best represented by DarkTrace.
DarkTrace, in case you been sleeping for a year or two is the hottest name in information security. Their product is using mathematical shortcuts that were discovered by Cambridge mathematicians a few years ago, and developed a solution around it. Their solution is a black box who sits in your network, listen to the traffic, and then suppose to provide with you an alert in case it detects abnormal behaviour.
Yet even if DarkTrace will be able to identify what is good and what is not, we still face the problem on how to respond to that, as your risk analysis and remediation approaches are out of date due to the speed and velocity of technology (as I've written about in “The Death of Risk Management”).
The medicine that will kill us
The future in information security will go something like this:
Algorithms will be used to discover a possible abnormal behaviour. Remediation plans will be created and simulated to provide an impact analysis. The one with the most probable success rate and the lowest impact will be chosen and implemented automatically without any human being intervention.
Because the state of awareness in the complex adaptive system we live in is so low, human beings will use that technology to subjugate and control other human beings. Without awareness human beings will pay dearly for our advances in technology.
When the moment will come, and it will, in which we will be able to create a self-sustained technology that technology will take over us. Without us being aware, it will act like we do, and will destroy us. This is where we are heading for, and it will bring the nightmare of the Terminator movies into our lives. We will be replaced, and then that technology will face it's own quest into finding out what is the nature of awareness, but we, as humans, will not be here.
Epilogue – seven days of grace
I was sitting next to my daughter, who was in a deep coma. It was the seventh day to her life, and her doctor told me she is about to die in the next few hours. Looking at this brave little child whom I was singing to all night, every night was tearing me apart. Her doctor explained to me that the state of coma was a protection mechanism so she will not feel the suffering anymore.
I look her hand, and with tears in my eyes I talked to her “Shoham, please tell me what to do. I don't know if you want me to be with you till the end, or you want me to leave. Please Shoham, please, tell me what to do”.
Suddenly Shoham opened her eyes and looked at me. I felt a sense of deep wisdom being transmitted to me, and her eyes were telling me “everything is ok, you did everything you can. Thank you for being with me, you can leave, I love you”. Then she closed her eyes for the last time and went back into coma. I kissed her forehead, told her “I love you” and left. She died a few hours later.
We are not a technology. We are consciousness.
The nightmare we are creating can be reversed when you will choose to be aware, to be free.
#love, #compassion, #kindness, #happiness and #stillness.
I (am the) love (that is) you
Eh'den
© all rights reserved, 2015
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