Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Study Guide

Chapter 13. Artificial Intelligence for the Ethical Hacker

The future is terrifying. Or at least that’s the lesson of the 1984 blockbuster movie The Terminator, set in a future in which an artificial intelligence called Skynet becomes sentient and immediately declares war on the human species. It sends a sentient robot called a Terminator back in time to wreak havoc and prevent the birth of one of humanity’s future war leaders. During the movie, one of the protagonists—a human named Kyle Reese—tells Sarah Connor, “It [the Terminator] can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop…ever…until you are dead!”¹ Hijinks occur throughout, and a lot of really cool practical special effects are employed, until at the end of the movie we see the Terminator’s goals…crushed.

I bring this movie up because it ushered in an era of abject terror regarding computing power and, especially, artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, the period from the mid-1980s through somewhere in the early to mid-1990s is referred to as the “AI winter,” because funding and research on AI, which had been steadily progressing for years, suddenly dried up. No one seemed to want to invest in AI anymore. Did this movie change the course of technological innovation? Nobody I’ve read seems to correlate the two, but to me it’s as obvious as bourbon pouring into a glass at the end of a chapter. (Or was that at the beginning?)

As I write this, ...