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OCEAN CITY — Government advisers from both the public and private sectors are pushing for local officials to embrace the use of artificial intelligence for cybersecurity.
“If you are not using AI within your cybersecurity framework, then I would argue that you’re not really doing cybersecurity,” Stephen Pereira, director of technology services and chief information officer for Calvert County, said during a panel discussion Wednesday.
The session about the role of AI in cybersecurity was part of the first day of this year’s Maryland Association of Counties summer conference.
By not using AI in cybersecurity systems, Pereira said, government officials won’t have real-time information on ransomware attacks or be able to match the speed and level of information with which a hacker may operate, among other shortcomings.
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Panel members and state Sen. Mary Beth Carozza, who moderated, said that officials should assess their current approach to AI use in cybersecurity, determine where they might be falling short and learn from best practices in other local governments.
They also pushed for officials to regularly reevaluate their approaches, considering the exponentially increasing speed at which AI systems are evolving.
“We have an obligation to our constituents to figure out, ‘How do we use AI in a way that best serves our constituents? At the same time, how do we balance it against these risks?’” Carozza, a Republican whose district includes Ocean City, said in an interview after the panel discussion.
While AI can boost cybersecurity, it also can present ethical and privacy concerns and prove challenging for local governments to implement, panel members said.
Carozza said that government officials and their teams should ensure that constituents trust that their information and tax-dollar-funded services are protected against bad actors.
Among the broader worries about AI is whether it will put people out of work, though panel members contended that wouldn’t be the case.
“I don’t see it replacing people’s jobs,” said Rob O’Connor, chief information officer for the state comptroller’s office. “I look at AI as going from the hammer to the nail gun. It’s just a technological advancement and we need to learn how to embrace it and bring it in, but in a controlled fashion.”
County governments, O’Connor said, should already have cybersecurity frameworks and policies within which to incorporate AI systems.
In the comptroller’s office, staff members use AI to detect fraud when processing the millions of tax returns it receives over the course of several months leading up to mid-April. The AI system is especially needed to process — within just a few days — the large quantity of returns that come in close to Tax Day, O’Connor said.
The people attempting to defraud the state are also using AI models, which become progressively smarter, resulting in an ongoing battle between the comptroller’s office and fraudsters. O’Connor said this underscores the importance of governments relying on AI in cybersecurity and constantly evaluating its systems.
“We have to be extremely protective of that data model because it has 3.1 million taxpayers’ information,” he said.
Panel members also briefly discussed the more philosophical, existential fears surrounding AI, though their general conclusions were that the human race is safe, for now.
“Whether or not you see AI as truly going to make us obsolete and destroy the human race, I don’t know. I think it’s unlikely,” Pereira said, then adding, tongue in cheek, “I’m not ruling it out.”
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Publish date : 2024-08-14 10:12:00
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