• Chris Skinner, Chairman at The Financial Services Club


• 10.02.2017 10:30 am
undisclosed

Building on yesterday’s blog, there was another interesting debate about the risks of humans in the network.  Humans screw up.  Humans cause problems.  Humans have emotions.  Humans are not welcome here.

A good example of why humans are not welcome is that it is typically human error that causes issue.  A self-driving car is likely to drive a million miles without an accident, whilst a human driven car crashes three or four times on average throughout the driver’s lifetime.  I would personally prefer to be operated upon by a robotic surgeon with a million successful operations under its belt, rather than a human surgeon who makes a mistake once in 10,000 operations.  I would have more confidence in traders that were automated and settled without error, than a human trader who may be rogue and where we need to invest millions to reconcile what they’ve traded, when and where.

You get the point.

A machine can process things far more effectively than a human.  It’s the reason why Tesla wants to ban humans from its operations as they slow progress and why Amazon would prefer delivery via drones.  A machine can be programmed to get it right first time, every time and never get it wrong.  A human cannot.

A human can let people through a border control because they look like their passport photo; a machine will recognise that they’re not that person.  A human can be engineered to allow a cyberhacker into the building; a machine will not.  In fact, on this last point, that is a critical issue: humans can be socially engineered to do things that machines will not.  This is the core of our humanity: trust.  We naturally want to trust people.  People do naturally trust people.  That is our basic human nature, but it’s also the reason why we get ripped off. I blogged about this in 2013 when Tony Sale, Britain’s greatest fraudster, spoke at the Financial Services Club.

“Tony is using basic social engineering skills to achieve this and, as he pointed out regularly in his presentation, the problem we have is that most people believe people are honest.”

Jamie Woodruff, the Ethical Hacker, followed up by saying the same and claiming that the easiest way to steal online is all about social engineering.

People are the weakest link.  So we must get rid of them.

If we get rid of people, we can have bulletproof banks, foolproof operations and guaranteed success.  In fact, it galls me immensely that the only time these days where I get angry with poor service is when the automated processes fail and I have to deal with a human.  We must automate everything.

This article originally appeared on thefinanser.com