In a recent blog post titled The Future of Internet Immune systems, BoingBoing founder Cory Doctorow compares the war between internet security measures and security threats to that of the interaction between your body’s immune system and ‘attacks from the outside’. Before potentially harmful elements can do real harm, they are taken out by the immune system.

Doctorow notes however how our current internet immune systems (and other security systems with a certain degree of automation or automated ‘interpretation’ of data) all too often turn against their own body. Suffering caused by cases of mistaken identity or rather, immune deficiency, … the art of interpretation is a subtle one.

Through several real life examples Doctorow expresses his hopes  for a future in which the following is no longer true.

“[currently] there’s a terrible asymmetry in a world where defensive takedowns are automatic, but correcting mistaken takedowns is done by hand.”

When confronting people with images of a security/control-obsessed future, these missers – and ‘who’s in control of it all’ – are the main catalysts for fear.

While mostly used in a metaphorical way here, since several years, immune systems are more than a mere inspirational metaphor in design patterns for intelligent systems. With links to biomimicry, artificial immune systems (aka Immunological Computation, Immunocomputing)  are becoming more widespread in use, not only in the area of spam and malware detection, but also other areas in which pattern recognition plays a central role. Newer generations of such systems rely on danger theory, which starts from the belief that immune systems react against what is dangerous rather than what is merely foreign (see also here).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 10:54 and is filed under future, technology, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.