AI threat demands new approach to security designs -US official

Ottawa (Reuters) – The potential threat posed by the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) means safeguards need to be built in to systems from the start rather than tacked on later, a top U.S. official said on Monday.

“We’ve normalized a world where technology products come off the line full of vulnerabilities and then consumers are expected to patch those vulnerabilities. We can’t live in that world with AI,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“It is too powerful, it is moving too fast,” she said in a telephone interview after holding talks in Ottawa with Sami Khoury, head of Canada’s Centre for Cyber Security.

Easterly spoke the same day that agencies from 18 countries, including the United States, endorsed new British-developed guidelines on AI cyber security that focus on secure design, development, deployment and maintenance.

“We have to look at security throughout the lifecycle of that AI capability,” Khoury said.

Earlier this month, leading AI developers agreed to work with governments to test new frontier models with Spanish bishops visiting the Vatican on Tuesday.

Concern For The Environment

The pope has made protection of the environment one of the cornerstones of his pontificate.

In a document issued in October, Francis had appealed to climate change deniers and foot-dragging politicians to have a change of heart, saying they cannot gloss over its human causes or deride scientific facts while the planet “may be nearing the breaking point”.

Francis also said the transition to clean, renewable energy and the abandonment of fossil fuels was not going fast enough.

The Vatican had announced on Monday the pope would limit his activities this week in order to conserve his strength after contracting the flu.

A CT scan done at a Rome hospital on Saturday excluded pneumonia but detected inflammation in the pope’s lungs that caused breathing difficulties. He was receiving antibiotics intravenously, the Vatican said on Monday.

As a young man in his native Argentina, Francis had part of a lung removed.