Expect the Unexpected

On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by a group organized by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret military society. The assassination triggered a month of escalating military and diplomatic events which led to the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war against Serbia. That would in turn set off yet another set of escalating events which would lead to the Central Powers and Allies to declare war on each other, engulfing the world in the First World War.

The links and complex alliances, made it so that a single event could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction.

Very recently, on 20 July 1014, we experienced a world-wide service outage at critically-important service providers, resulting from the issue affecting Microsoft systems globally. The issue was identified to be the result of a technical problem in the cybersecurity CrowdStrike antivirus software used by Microsoft for its Windows devices.

We may be tempted to view this event as a rare occurrence, and brush it aside. We must resist that urge. As our dependency on technology grows greater, and with systems becoming more complex and reliant on each other, the risks of potential disruption increase significantly - and so do the possible ramification of such risks, should they materialize.

On 28 June 1914, at 10:45 am, four empires ruled millions of people. The shots heard at that time would lead to millions of lives being lost, four empires would collapse and world history would be changed forever. The level of uncertainty associated with new and emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and its many potential uses, ushers in a new era of risk. The unimaginable may just need to be imagined.