Think about security in this sense; if the brain had a built-in mechanism to firewall or stop dangerous cells or chemicals from entering it, then the most critical machine we possess would be safe.

Is security already dead in this age of AI? It’s quite possible to fool oneself into believing that you are secure while browsing the internet or, worse, when you connect an AI to your systems or accounts. This is especially true now that AI systems are becoming increasingly powerful. As naive as this may sound, I think we are not safe, and neither are our nations.

Many ordinary people, myself included, do not worry enough about our data being misused or our privacy being violated. “Let it happen. What do I have to lose, right?” The problem, however, comes when the government we rely on to keep us safe adopts this new technology and connects it to citizens’ data repositories without proper safeguards. This symptom is seen in most African countries, including Kenya.

Safeguards that are already in place or still being developed include policies and laws that restrict the use of such technologies. Such measures could be useful to some extent, but building a safe computational universe of powerful programs requires other ways of safeguarding our systems. Most importantly, we need to build the right tools to provide strong protection through automation.

The first step, I think, is to recognise that there is a threat. A government that knows about a threat to its nation ahead of time is in a stronger position to respond to it. The facts are already out; evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence create new opportunities for sophisticated attacks. Think of biological, cyber, information, and psychological warfare. I am not an expert in these areas, but given the direction we are heading in as a civilization, it seems clear to me that some, if not all, of these outcomes will occur. How can we use this powerful new tool to our advantage without creating a “mess”?

We can realise, first, that there are limits to what intelligence can predict efficiently. Computational irreducibility is one of them; some things cannot simply be predicted or simplified; you have to run the system to see what will happen. This is a powerful concept and, I think, a useful guide for humans navigating the computational universe because it helps us understand where even AI faces limits.

What am I proposing here? Irreducibility as a possible line of defense. For some systems, predicting how they will behave requires working through essentially the same computation as the systems themselves. In fact, greater intelligence alone does not remove that limit. Could we, then, use this to make certain attacks harder? My idea is to explore whether irreducibility can help us build stronger defenses into systems.

Of course, this could work only in certain areas, such as cyber and information warfare. But in areas such as biological warfare, because biology is weird, it might not. Defending against a bioweapon requires other approaches. These might be computationally harder, but they also open up research opportunities in computational biology.

Dilate is built around this principle. Our goal is to build systems designed to resist attacks and remain dependable under pressure, i.e., systems that are “impossible” to hack. To do that, we started programmes, such as Loopseed, for researching, testing and building AI systems that remain under human control.

Other projects, such as Quanta, focus on building and strengthening humanity’s future by investing in children’s computational thinking while preparing them for life in the computational universe.

We have pilots in place for these programmes, and we are looking for organizations, schools and governments to work with us to support them as we build a sustainable future for life on this planet. I will be announcing these projects and more in future posts, so keep an eye out.

The opportunities extend beyond security. We believe engineering work will help shape the future of our civilization through advances in governance, scientific discovery, national security and, most importantly, the development and protection of critical infrastructure.

Finally, Dilate welcomes anyone or any organization with ideas on how to secure the future of our nations and humanity as a whole. Get in touch if you’d like to work with us.