Transcript

Feeling Safe in Scary Times | Aidan Kehoe | TEDxFairfieldUniversity

hi everybody we're back in the green room having a chat I don't know if you know what you do before you come out to do a TED talk it's you go back in the green room there's some extraordinary people out there and it is an extraordinary honor for me to be here with you today and I know what you're thinking I'm not a doctor but I'm from Ireland so you don't have to worry if something bad goes wrong you have an Irish person here to get you set and what we're going to do today is I'm gonna lay out some context for you about what it was like before TED talks so when I was growing up there was no TED talk Stephanie gnarl and I was born in 1981 so I am technically a millennial even though I don't don't look walk talk like them either and we're gonna talk on about Millennials today and when I was born Ronald Reagan had just taken office and if you see here on the right hand side that's a picture outside my back garden it's pretty big garden and at the time I definitely didn't think I was ever going to be in America where I am on the stage right now today at the same time my industry is cyber security so it was the IBM had just released a PC and Microsoft had put their software on it in a kind of a historic partnership and but at 1992 was the first time that I put a stake in the ground and like predicted what the future was going to be like so if you get a sense of the context at that time we had President Clinton just been elected and we had a former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was still pursuing your career in acting or he just come out with Terminator 2 I presume you all know where you were when Terminator 2 came out right and for me I was in school so you can see here and back back at a class as usual got the little circle on my head and I actually wrote an article when I was 12 years old about computers and as part of going through this process today I made some predictions about the future and I was wrong about a bunch of them and I was right about one or two of them and today I'm going to take - some of those predictions and I'm gonna talk a little bit about the prepare the future that I think is coming as we all sit here today so this is the article right here you can see that was not my artistry on the bottom I wish it was that good at drawing but the first prediction I made was that if you bought you should buy a Philips PC that was the PC I recommended it would cost you about 1500 pounds I response at the time and I I'm I bet was you could have that computer for a lifetime so I was so far wrong about having a computer for a lifetime now people have him for a day or two the next prediction I made I was looking I was very good with the warning sign and wanted to make sure everyone knew this is the warning part of the magazine that we were writing about and I said that your maximum amount of time you should spend is roughly half an hour the computer can be addictive and that's another reason why there should be a time limit on all computers now I was right I wish I knew how right I was back then I would have bet a lot bigger on it being addictive and then I was in protecting the computers so here I have a whole section on protecting computers and I was 12 years old and back then I was more focused on the outside because my main recommendation is that you just put plastic on your computer and everything will be okay and we've now migrated to the fact that I spend all my life trying to protect the inside of them but my dream was to make difference in the world and I think everybody here today wakes up every day with the same dream everybody wants to make a difference in the world so my dream going to when I was at the back looking at the garden I always want to move to America because if I could have an impact in someone's life in Ireland there was roughly four million at the time and in the u.s. there was over 300 million I figured the US would be a lot bigger if I could have an impact turns out it is and so I was 23 years old I got on a plane and I flew to Florida where everybody goes because that was where I knew one person and I ended up cleaning dishes in this restaurant clean dishes and I got promoted to cleaning glasses and then I got promoted again to being a barback and ultimately became a bartender where I served outside of this bar now what I No was Jupiter Florida wasn't exactly America it was the epicenter of kind of wealth in the United States and every evening I would have all billionaires different billionaires sitting in these seats and I got a front-row seat to some of the more successful people in the world and what I did was I asked him a lot of questions I was like how did you become successful and everybody had the same answer everybody said I worked really hard right he said he worked hard too and then of the subset of people only 10% of those people managed to have a successful relationship while they worked all those years and I asked those people I said how did you manage to keep your relationship together when you were working so hard they all had the same answer they all said you got to make sure you marry a great person and I'm very fortunate that I'm working very hard and I was able to marry a great person and she's here I see her sitting in the audience down there today now from here I took some time and said to myself Ari how do I get close to the success and hold on tight for the right and I was very fortunate to build a company and I worked on a project called Hudson Yards so it's basically the largest if you know where Sully landed the plane it's right there in your heart in New York City there was Steve Ross who's my partner today he owns an NFL football team and he did this amazing development in New York and right at the beginning when we were looking at this project you know one of the amazing things about Steve is he said something to me that I'll never forget he said if you bet small and you win you've lost so I wanted to find a sector something that I could be passionate about and make a big bet to see if we could make a difference in the world and at the core reason for me to do this for me to do this was I believed everybody wants to feel safe you are going to hear some talks later today and some of the ones that happened already and I think to unlock innovation and all these sectors people are going to feel safe and that was something that if I could work on I thought that would be worth doing I didn't know at the same time we were sitting at the forefront of an Industrial Revolution so we're here in Fairfield University the new school the School of Engineering 25 year anniversary at a time when there is so many trends going on in the world any one of these could create an industrial revolution the first one big buzzword everywhere now is AI my mother told me the only art of the only intelligence I would ever have when I was at work was artificial so I'm uniquely suited to talk about that at the same time we have privacy legislation changing the world everybody cares now about their data and they have rights to it and privacy is a right that everybody in here has we have IOT if you think about the connected world that we live in everybody here has had multiple connections with the Internet today you look at Alexa and Siri and voice in your home and it's with you every day and you have earbuds probably from your Apple device that you sits right in here and audio is actually something that not a lot of people are talking about but the connected devices are going to touch every part of your body quantum computing if you think of the compute power it takes for a computer to do something for a thousand years we'll be able to do that in seconds there's actually a breakthrough this very week on quantum computing by Google an augmented reality and virtual reality will change particularly retail as we know it so people ask me all the time what's it like in cybersecurity and I tell them it's like riding a tiger when you have a tiger you know you see a guy on top say how did he get on that tiger how did he get the saddle on the tiger how was he holding on so much and when you're in cybersecurity you're like oh my god I hope my arms don't get eaten and this is a picture of what it's like for me every day this is somebody I work with had this picture done up a year ago I'm really disappointed I don't think it's a fair reflection of my chain so I'm gonna get it read on I'm gonna try and have a read on but essentially this is what it's like for me in cyber everyday so why is this such a hard problem well we we have more data that's been created in the last three years down in the history of mankind no no take a minute to think about that more data created in the last three years than in the history of mankind and that curve is only going up at the same time we have an epidemic shortage of cyber talent so there's three million job openings in security today now when you have the data going up and you have the shortage of talent like that you're very fortunate to see to hear all these amazing doctors but what if we had a problem that we didn't have a doctor for what would it be like to deal with that problem combine that with the fact there is such a huge challenge around communication with this industry in particular the IT and security community they communicate and bits and bytes they use word like cookies and worms and phishing and regular people when they think with these terms to think of a cookie a worm and phishing so we are in it in an environment today where that communication challenge combine that with the fact that these two companies if you can buy it you know if you took out your phone and you opened up Google which I'm sure you all do multiple times a day and you type in Amazon you have to go through nine pages before you find out that it's a forest not an e-commerce company so people who were born in this moment in time they you know they are gonna grow up in a world that it's almost hard for you to imagine in terms of digitization and then when you have bad people with this landscape happening at the same time it presents tremendous opportunity for them to do bad things but the good news is that 99.99% of all attacks happen the same way everybody cares about something deeply so all cyber and all attacks you can you can basically say that they're either trying to attack your identity execute on your machine or your information or send in a denial of service so you don't get access to something and all you have to do is focus on the confidentiality the integrity and the availability of the information and systems that you care about most so every cyberattack you hear in the news you can boil it down to is if the confidentiality integrity or availability of information and systems when you look at Andrew Maslow he was very much ahead of his time and he knew that safety was a requirement for everybody to thrive and you think about the digital footprint that people are leaving today I want you to know that every digital footprint you leave it matters and if you think about when I was back in Ireland and I was making those predictions there was indicators like the addictiveness of technology that some of these things were going to be a big deal in the future so today we're gonna talk about some of these predictions that I think are really we're gonna need real live indicators of problems that are happening Marc Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce and he said that Facebook is the new cigarettes so I bet you everybody in this room has some some Facebook account whether you're on whatsapp or you're on Instagram and you'd like to spend more less time on it than you do and that's what it was like with smoking in the beginning the problem had a lot of very addictive habits to it very difficult to kick at the same time this company is has the future of democracy in its hands and the future of democracy sits in our private sector today that has never happened before it was always with the government sector at the same time we're trying to change privacy regulations so that you get that right that you deserve at the same time every individual in here will gather hundreds and thousands of connections to the internet every day and that not everybody in here thinks about their data in the same way so we will eventually create a sub-prime of data where you get paid for allowing advertisers to harvest your information not everybody wants to be protected the same way when you have artificial intelligence and there is some amazing innovations that will come with AI I want you to know that it can be used for good and for bad I want you to know that every IT provider you know is doing heroic work and all these people will have to become cyber providers I know at some point we will have to think about building a new Internet because anything that's fundamentally open it's difficult to close we'll have to think about it design it in a new way and if you have a problem there is no 911 there's no place to call there is no emergency services so I still believe that everybody in here wants to make a difference in the world the millennial generation and Jen's II are the first generation that have really put their feet forward and said that they are going to hold companies accountable for what they do and that presents an amazing opportunity for everybody in here today to encourage that type of behavior because I know you all care about someone deeply these are the people who I care about deeply so two years ago my son Liam who's sitting up front there was diagnosed with autism and I think about the autism research that's happening all over the world that's what I care about what would happen if something affected the confidentiality integrity or availability of that information I know that you have a digital footprint and you have somebody that you care about I want you to think about how you can change the world by caring about it more every day thank you [Applause] you