Nick Percoco has been thinking a lot about the future of technology, and some of the things he’s dreamed up aren’t very pretty: farms of people renting out their spare brain cycles, autonomous cars that freak out and careen into oncoming traffic and hacking groups hijacking users’ augmented reality gear and demanding ransoms to unlock them.
That’s a fairly dark, dystopian view of what’s awaiting us in the coming decades, but it’s not necessarily the way that Percoco believes it has to be. Rather, he believes there’s plenty of time, talent and technology available to solve the fundamental security and reliability problems that could lead to that dim future. Percoco, a security researcher and vice president of strategic services at Rapid 7, said that the brighter, technologically slick future he imagined as a young boy first learning about computers is still a possibility.
