“14 Jobs That Will Soon Be Obsolete.” “Can A Robot Do Your Job?” “These Seven Careers Will Fall Victim to Automation.” For each incremental advance in automation technology, it seems there’s an accompanying piece of alarmist clickbait, warning of a future in which robots will be able to do everything we can, only better, cheaper, and for longer. Proponents of AI and automation view this as the harbinger of a golden age, ushering in a future free from all the paper-pushing, the drudgery, the mundane and repetitive things we have to do in our lives. We will work shorter hours, focus on more meaningful work, and actually spend our leisure time on, well, leisure.
But while it’s one thing to enjoy having a robot zipping across the floor picking up your 3-year-old’s wayward Cheerios, it’s quite another to imagine automation coming to our workplace. For those of us in cybersecurity, however, it has become a foregone conclusion: Now that criminals have begun adopting automation and AI as part of their attack strategies, it’s become something of an arms race, with businesses and individuals racing to stay one step ahead of increasingly sophisticated bad actors that human analysts will no longer be able to fend off on their own.
Spurred by growth in both the number of companies deploying automation and the sophistication of threats, automated processes are closing in on and even surpassing human analysts in some tasks—which is making some cybersecurity professionals uneasy. “When robots are better threat hunters, will there still be a place for me? What if someday, they can do everything I can do, and more?”
According to the “ cybersecurity robots coming
