Our Cyberpunk Future is Here, Just Not Evenly Distributed

our keynote speaker is someone who i absolutely adore he's my personal cyber safety hero and he's going to talk to us about why our cyberpunk future is here but it's not evenly distributed so let's hear a little bit about him okay beau woods beau woods is from the i am the cavalry grassroots movement of friendly hackers he has many roles with defcon and with different villages like the aerospace village the ics village and the biohacking village he's also the co-author of the popular book practical iot hacking bestseller on amazon and of course he participates many years in defcon and b-sides in fact beau brought me to my very first besides las vegas now one more fun fact about

our speaker as i see he's ready backstage he was a volunteer at the very first b-sides tel aviv 2021 bo are you ready okay he will be ready in a second we're gonna give him a very warm besides tel aviv welcome because bo woods is going to show us how our cyberpunk future is becoming a reality let's give him a warm round of applause bo the stage is yours thank you so much thank you and remember masks on until you are on stage thank you very much this is uh i think it's my my third time to israel i think it's my third b-sides although my first one speaking so i'm very very excited to

be here uh to be able to talk to everybody um as i was putting this together i really had to kind of come to grips with what does it mean to be cyberpunk uh and what does it mean to evenly distribute a cyberpunk future uh so i want to take you through some thoughts on that um first my day so this morning my term woke me up at 6 30 way too early and then i i got my pre-measured stems you know coffee in the form of caffeine in the form of coffee then i i hailed a ride with my term as we do these days checked my crypto credits while i was waiting turns out they're down sorry uh and then

you know i wasn't the first one the car it was a shared ride so i turned my phones to blocking mode so that i could silence all the noise but it was okay i'm sure they didn't want to talk they were already too busy jacked into the net and watching movies and then when i came here into the event my vaxcode passed i wore my mask so my mask checked out and here i am and so this is the the cyberpunk reality that i think is evenly distributed today this is what we're all living through right now uh looking around at so many masked faces and realizing that this is what we thought the future was going to be like

20 years ago because of pollution and smog little did we know that it would be uh because of a global pandemic um what does the future of cyberpunk look like and how is it already here well most of us probably recognize this video from what yesterday two days ago uh this is the um jeff bezos space rocket that he launched off into low earth orbit uh i think he got uh somewhere around a minute worth of of zero g and he followed richard branson into space uh richard branson of course another billionaire who has his eyes set on going to space and spending more time there and then of course elon musk famously wants to to

spend his last days on mars but this is more than just a bunch of billionaires trying to one-up each other trying to get into space to prove that they can there's much more beyond that and if you recognize this video this is the speech from 1961 where john f kennedy inspired us to go to the moon not just as a nation but as humanity itself bringing all the world to the moon he said we choose to go to the moon not because it's easy but because it is hard and he inspired a lot of cyberpunk authors now the moonshot the original moonshot it built on well-known physics so we already knew the physics of orbital dynamics and

motion but we needed new materials engineering we needed to have new ways of channeling all of the creativity that we had within the scientific community within the engineering community into this major endeavor and beyond just the moon we also have to look at space deeper space someday maybe in the not too distant future we will be uh conducting space mining operations now there's a scale of civilization maturity um that posits different levels of civilization will have different energy capture and use capabilities type one is planetary civilization these are civilizations that use the entire planet's energy sources all at once then stellar civilizations use an entire star's energy source with something like a dyson sphere to capture all of the

energy coming out of their star type three galactic civilizations are even bigger they tap into black holes in the center of the universe or at the center of the the the galaxy now we're on about 0.72 i was reading on the internet so we know it must be true about a 0.72 on this scale so we are almost to the scale where we're going to go beyond our planet and start using the rest of our stellar resources but there's something else in that rocket ship that took off yesterday and it's the idea of rapid global transport by going out of the atmosphere i know in a lot of the cyberpunk books they have to get a character from one

place to another really rapidly and they use this type of technology to do that and it's amazing to read about what we have today uh in some of the the space um uh space flights that we're doing and see that this might become a reality you know within our lifetimes it might be possible to go new york to tel aviv in two hours that's absolutely amazing and you might be saying oh that's too far off it'll never happen well uh if we go back in time and look at flight you know just regular ordinary plain old flight from the 1940s to now it's changed massively it is massively democratized the ability for us to travel around the world boston

to los angeles in the 40s was a multi-hour in endurance race 12 stops 15 hours that sounds grueling i don't know that i would want to be on that flight and it cost the equivalent of 4 500 us dollars today it's a third of the time non-stop and you can have it for a tenth of the price this is an amazing transition and again this is within a single lifespan but let's switch it up a little bit let's go from space travel to something closer to us medicine we're in the midst of multiple concurrent revolutions in healthcare there's so much going on in healthcare it's absolutely astounding i don't want to go into all of this i

have about an hour-long talk where i go into all of the cool things that are going on in healthcare and biohacking but i just want to touch on a few of them there are experiments right now they're actual working machines we're at the engineering stage where you can regrow human tissue people are talking about replacing things like your ear or internal organs even through bioreactors this is absolutely phenomenal technology it's it's crazy to think about that this is within our reach today and in fact there are some biohackers who are playing with this and they're doing things like producing insulin in a couple of jars that they have set up that they built for you know less than

50 we have automated surgical robots now this whole video you can see that the robot slices off the skin of the grape and then sews it back up and it's doing it autonomous autonomously and it's a robot doing it the capabilities that this brings to potentially get more expert care to more people is phenomenal again democratizing and making these things available but our dystopian future is also on the prep precipice it is here it's just not realized yet again going back to this view multiple concurrent revolutions but they depend on ai which we're only really starting to understand fully um data driven and we know the problems that we have protecting the confidentiality integrity and

availability of data today code controlled hyper-connected these are issues that we have today security issues and challenges that we haven't yet solved today let alone in future technologies like bioreactors in future technologies like surgical robots where the conditions may be very different than what we find today in computers laptops servers mobile devices and i want to talk about a couple of these so there's some amazing technology out there for victims of ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder where you can stimulate their brain stem and help them recover faster this can also help with epilepsy it can help with all kinds of things and some of these devices are going through clinical trials right now and some of the doctors have found that

the patients are actually modifying the devices so that they can get high from them now this is not a technology that anyone would have imagined 20 years ago you would have neural implants so that you can get high except in cyberpunk fiction but it is a reality today it's just not distributed to everyone um this is an actress angel jafra and she was in the hunger games movies uh which is a dystopian film but it's not a cyberpunk film um she has a prosthetic hand and this is actually a bionic hand she controls it by moving certain muscles in her upper arm this hand recharges via bluetooth if you can believe it or by a usb and it

has bluetooth connectivity so when i talked to her i invited her to come out to defcon and talk to people and she said i'm afraid i don't know if somebody's going to hack my hand this is the world that we're starting to live in and she asked a really interesting question which is if i want to go to the digital equivalent of a gym just you know improve the strength of this hand do i have the right to do that if it breaks do i have the right to even repair it i don't know these are legal questions they're challenges that we're going to have to address this is our cyberpunk dystopian future where we may not even

be control of our bodies and then this one's really interesting this is a woman named poppycrom and she has a few talks including this great ted talk talking about the end of the poker face and when we have the ability to capture high quality sensory emanations thermal video carbon dioxide carbon monoxide monitoring some of these other things that we just give off naturally it reveals our internal state in a way that we've never been able to do before essentially you may never be able to tell another lie or have somebody believe you in that lie it won't be very convincing and as i was talking to her i slowly started to realize that it's scary that we might never be able

to tell a lie it's even scarier to realize we may not ever be able to lie to ourselves think about how many rationalizations we make on a daily basis how many fictions we have to tell ourselves to get through the day what's that going to do to us again this is the the dystopian cyber future that we're already living in okay so what do we do to change that how can we be better how can we make the world that we want to see you know not the world that that dystopian fiction tells us has to exist but the world that we want to exist as passionate creative hackers in this room well i'll again go back to this video of

john f kennedy because it's inspirational it sets a clear vision for what we want where we're going what we want to do and i would like to inspire everyone and encourage everyone to start building not just breaking breaking is fun there's lots of work in breaking things but but breaking isn't fundamentally a generative activity it doesn't create the future we want to see kind of like you know race cars can only go fast because they have good brakes a race car's top speed is actually limited by its ability to brake because going around corners you want to be safe but you can't create a fast race car you can't create a rocket ship just with the things that are going to

make it safe you have to do it with everything else including the things that will make it safe i think we can draw on the the known physics of security you know we might not know all the things to do to protect ourselves in cyber security but we at least know how to avoid what we can reliably say fails so let's start avoiding those things and let's creatively apply ourselves into new engineering this is a competition held last year at the virtual defcon the follow-up is going to be held this year at defcon in a couple of weeks it's the hakka sat competition um with the aerospace village they're inviting you to come and hack a satellite a satellite in

orbit what does it look like to hack a satellite well what does it look like to secure a satellite when you're putting something up into space it's going to be thousands of miles away from the nearest fix-it lab you can't just bring that in and update it change out the hardware upgrade the software you have low bandwidth high latency connections these are totally different environmental conditions you have totally different technologies that are up there what does it mean to have something that you know has to last for decades in a way that you can't can't engage with it can't repair it like you would a terrestrial system we're going to have to to apply what we know about security

into these new domains and build it in rather than trying to bolt it on work with the companies go to work with somebody who inspires you somebody who's exciting one of these space companies one of the healthcare companies where the conditions are very different than what you might see in your regular job my first job out of college my first job in security was working at a hospital where the conditions that i found myself in were very different from the conditions that i found later when i was working for financial services organizations for instance in healthcare if you lock someone out of an account to preserve the confidentiality of data you might inadvertently come come into conflict with preserving

the integrity and availability of human life so how do we secure those health care systems how do we preserve the hope the promise of all of this amazing incredible technology i believe that the future health of our species is going to be dependent on the trust we can place in the technology in healthcare how do we ensure that people trust this technology that they will adopt it so they can have the best care possible and then finally how do we think about equity and inclusion uh after 1969 when the first astronauts landed on the moon um gil scott herron did an amazing spoken word and i would encourage you to go check it out where he's effectively highlighting

um the vast gap between the haves and the have-nots even after we went to the moon the future was not well distributed and so he goes through and talks about challenges of the members of his community to pay the rent to get health care to get access to enough food to eat and enough water to drink so that they could make a live for themselves and live out that dream of providing for your families so how do we make sure that we're not inadvertently biasing the future we're building the benefits towards the wealthy or towards small groups and all the hardships the less wealthy or other groups the majority of groups and as karen mentioned um cyberpunk is a

lot about low lifes and high tech well how do we have high tech for all and so that the the people who are in the lower status lower strata of society can also be raised and lifted along with everyone else and i want to leave with a couple of quotes the first one is sheryl sandberg said if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship you don't ask what seat you just get on that's kind of true but what if this is your seat what if you're shoveling coal you know wouldn't be coal on the rocket ship but what if you're the thing that is um the fuel for it you don't reap the benefits

you only have the hardships how do we actually get towards a cyberpunk future that we can all appreciate all take advantage of and all benefit from the second quote is a guy named stuart brand he's one of the early environmental movement pioneers actually one of the early computing pioneers as well and he said we are as gods we might as well get good at it that was in 1968. i think that's changed a little bit i think we are as gods and we must get good at it for the future of humanity for the future of our planet for the future of all of our children our grandchildren to ensure that they can realize the

dreams of high tech without the dystopian parts of it and so i want to leave you with a thought this is a thought that inspired us to create eye on the cavalry uh in 2013. it is that the cavalry isn't coming the responsibility falls to us to each one of us to take an active role in shaping the future how we want to see it not just leaving it to someone else not saying you know somebody else is going to take care of this or i'm sure you know top people are working on it but to actually jump in to get involved to get engaged to put a little bit of our little bit of

ourselves out there to make the future what we want to see it a much better one for all of us and with that i'd like to thank you very much [Applause] [Music] thank you so much bo wait a minute i want to get like a like a hero shot with you together and i also want my clicker our clicker wasn't beau just fantastic yes you can give him another round of applause so beau went through a lot of effort to be here in tel aviv today and we really appreciate it thank you so much bo thank you thank you for coming to