Natalya Kasperskaya: "Artificial intelligence will become a weapon that is more terrible than an atomic bomb"

Digitalization is approaching Russians with an inexorable wall. In the metro, many already “pay with their face” in the truest sense of the word. Face Pay is a contactless fare payment method. Passengers no longer need to touch their smartphones or any other surfaces. To use the service, you need to register in the Moscow Metro mobile application, attach a photo of your face, Troika, and a bank card with funds to pay for travel.

Simultaneously with this innovation, the Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media Development Maksut Shadayev announced the government's plans by the end of next year to introduce biometric passports in at least three Russian regions. “We have agreed on a systematic project on how to launch an electronic passport. We are ready to issue a presidential decree. Now the last disagreements are already unprincipled removed", - said the head of the department.

One simple question arises from all these innovations: how can digital transparency of citizens turn out for them? What, besides convenience, can follow from all this? What are the risks of all this?

Natalya Kasperskaya, President of the Info Watch group of companies, co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, answered these questions in detail in her interview to journalists.

“I have a very bad attitude towards biometrics. First of all, because today there is no system for protecting biometric information. If they tell you otherwise, they will lie to you. And it is impossible to introduce any biometric systems before they come up with ways to adequately protect them. You also need to understand that, unlike login and password, biometric data cannot be changed. It is extremely difficult to change a face, and fingerprints cannot be changed at all. If biometric data is stolen, the person can be compromised in any way. And then you will be tortured to prove that it is not you ”.

“Today, all computer systems are capable of protecting all data only in percentage terms. Antivirus protection guarantees 99% security. But it still allows 1% leakage. Now let's transfer all this to biometric data. The face recognition system has errors of the first and second kind, when a stranger's face and your face are not recognized. These errors exist in the artificial intelligence system. Errors are still calculated in percentages, not fractions of a percent. What does it mean? Out of 100 million people, such biometrics may not recognize and, accordingly, not miss a million. We must not forget about such a thing as deepfake. This is when, with the help of artificial intelligence, a person can be made to say what he never said in his right mind, and all this will look absolutely natural. Yes, now they are making systems for deep recognition of such fakes. But frankly speaking, they do not work very well. We must also be aware that fraud is developing much faster than artificial intelligence. Security systems, unfortunately, are always in the tail".

- “The Minister of Digital Development is rushing things and declares that now a single biometric card will be introduced instead of a passport. This will be an electronic card. According to the minister, it is overdue. I have a question for such digitalizers: what are the reasons for this ripening? Who hurts what? We have been using passports for over 60 years. There are fakes, but they are not massive. And with electronic passports, forgeries will be massive. How to deal with this, who will tell? Digitalization has become a buzzword. Digitization for the sake of digitalization. And when you take a closer look, it turns out that no digitalization is needed at all".

“The world is moving towards transparency, and this is beneficial because it creates a new level of power. But this power will be held not only by officials, but also by their subordinates, by whose hands such systems are made. What is it worth, for example, to put the face of an administrator into an artificial intelligence system so that such a system allows him to go everywhere? This is not difficult at all. Yes, I believe that artificial intelligence is a weapon. And the main AI race will soon unfold in the military field. Some countries have long wanted to overcome nuclear parity, they will try to create a response to ultra-precise weapons that will hit targets without people. Artificial intelligence is the point where the struggle for world domination will unfold in the near future".