This article is part of an ongoing experiment with the use of ChatGPT for developing primers on cyber security topics.

Recent events have gotten me thinking about outsourcing in the knowledge economy and in particular, the information security economy specifically, as it is my particular speciality. With the advent of A.I. in the form of the LLM’s out there now and others being created and implemented, the landscape is already changing quickly in the security space. However, that is only one force at work today, the other is of course the economic pressures and direction at play with the current economy.

I have been seeing a trend, as I was unemployed for three months, job seeking was a part of my daily grind. In the process of job seeking, I was seeing trends in not only the req’s that were out there, but also, through the process of interviews and rejections, it became clear that the trend is “Do more with less” By proxy, this also means do more with less skilled people, force people into multi role single positions, and to generally pay much less for experience if possible, and if not, hire less skilled individuals and hope for the best outcome.

The tech layoffs that have been taking place this year and part of last are not over, and in doing this, there is a purge of salaries and a bent by corporations to drive down the salaries for security operations. It’s been talked about in articles already in the news and all you really have to do is look at Mastodon or Twitter of late to see how many people you might know in the community getting laid off and seeking work. Add to this the idea that augmentation, if not replacement, of knowledge economy workers with the advent of A.I. you have a potent mixture of incentives by corporations to not only cut head count, but, also to outsource potential work to less skilled and cheaper sources of labor.

What this means for the moment, is that the cries before of there not being enough “skilled” security workers have died down to murmers if not silenced altogether for a cheaper and more amenable fiscal alternative that CFO’s like better, e.g. hire all those unskilled or underskilled workers and save the Benjamins. This of course doesn’t make the security of the corporation any better, but hey, we have cyber insurance!

We are good.

All of you should have no illusions that your company really cares about security. The security of the data they hold for their clients and their own IP even, isn’t a commodity that they consider to be paramount. Security has always been a cost center, and even today in the midst of all the hacking and leaking as well as geopolitical attacks happening, corporations are much more about the bottom line than they are about the ethics of security. So, what does it all mean?

Buckle up kids… It’s gonna be a rough ride.

Additionally to this bent towards cheaper labor, comes the thorny issue of outsourcing tech jobs to other nations that are certainly cheaper, and I have seen this happening as well. In one case, I was trying to hook up a mentee with a job only to be told that because they had an OSCP and they were in the USA, they could not hire them because they were cost prohibitive.

You read that right, OSCP and too expensive for an org that is making money hand over fist. Trust me, the company is flush, but, also known to be cheap with the owner raking in the money like a Russian oligarch sucking the collective’s carotid artery. This will be the wave of the near future I suspect. Perhaps this will change as a generality once companies are hacked or governments make companies more responsible about their security, but, I won’t hold my breath.

Meanwhile, the A.I. movement is already building capabilities with the likes of Microsoft with their announcement of it’s implementation into CoPilot.

The above image is a screenshot from an article released last week about the implementation of A.I. into CoPilot. Yeah, seems to be adding fuel to the fire right? Well, Microsoft is only reading the auguries really, they aren’t stupid. So, what does this mean? Well, soon enough, the A.I. will be at a point where skilled labor will be a niceity instead of a need and corporations will gobble that shit up.

More on CoPilot: Microsoft brings GPT-4-powered Security Copilot to incident response and Microsoft Puts ChatGPT to Work on Automating Cybersecurity

See, the problem isn’t the A.I. or that it exists, it is the greed and the inability for comprehension of the issues that could arise from its use that will adversly affect society that is the problem. We may have created A.I. but we are still simple tool users who want a path of least resistance to doing work. Societally as well, we are in no way capable of having a true utopian ideal because we are still too unenlightened to seek the benefit of all over the one.

Anyway, I asked ChatGPT-4 about the problems around its use in something like CoPilot and this is what it puked out…

It’s not wrong…

K.

Krypt3ia generated this text with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. This author reviewed, edited, and revised the language to my own liking and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.