Burnaby?s Fortinet bulking up in face of cyber threats

Derrick Penner
The Province

International cybersecurity firm Fortinet is on the hunt to hire as many as 1,000 tech experts to fill its newly expanded data hub in Burnaby and help it keep on top of a rapidly expanding “threat landscape,” as security strategist Derek Manky puts it.

From ordinary “phishing” to sophisticated malware and ransomware attacks such as WannaCry, Manky estimates Fortinet deals with “north of one million” new cyber threats every day.

And the number of Internet-connected devices in need of protection — from intelligent appliances and cars to smartphones — is always growing.

“(Ransomware) is a threat that has been on our radar for some time, but it’s getting nastier as time moves on,” Manky said. “They’re becoming more persistent and more damaging.”

To keep up with combating them, Fortinet announced this week the completion of a major expansion at its Burnaby campus, the now California-headquartered firm’s key research and development facility, taking over a second building in its suburban office park off Still Creek Drive.

That increases its footprint to about 282,000 square feet from the 87,000 square feet that Fortinet’s existing workforce of about 700 operates from now.

Manky said the company will now be looking to recruit up to 1,000 people “sooner rather than later” to fill the space, although he acknowledged that the effort might take up to five years considering the firm hires about 50 to 60 new grads per year to fill its growing needs.

“We would like to get more, as you can see with the expansion,” Manky said. “One thousand is a big number.”

Fortinet isn’t the only local tech firm on a hiring binge. Its announcement follows news that online retail giant and data-services firm Amazon is advertising for more than 350 tech positions in Vancouver, with other companies looking to recruit new talent as well.

Besides threat-intelligence experts and threat analysts, Manky said the company needs web developers, user-interface designers and a plethora of other positions to make its system work.

For some positions, such as the developers and programmers, it is very difficult to recruit locally because these are the same jobs everyone is looking to fill, Manky said.

There is less competition locally for the specific security experts, but Manky said for more experienced personnel, the competition is getting tighter at the global level considering the growing need.

Fortinet, which has about 5,000 employees around the world, is working to help close its skills gaps by setting up Fortinet Acadamies in 65 countries to collaborate with universities and cultivate the talent they need.

Manky said in Canada, the company is working with four universities, and cultivating relationships with 19 more, and he himself sits on a program advisory committee at the B.C. Institute of Technology, his alma mater.

“There is a huge gap in cybersecurity skills right now,” Manky said. “If you look at (the industry) it’s expected to grow (by) two million positions worldwide by 2019 that are unfilled. There is simply a lot of demand.”

© 2017 Postmedia Network Inc.

Franklin Foer
The Vancouver Sun

When it comes to the most central tenet of individualism — free will — the tech companies have a different way. They hope to automate the choices, both large and small, we make as we float through the day. It’s their algorithms that suggest the news we read, the goods we buy, the paths we travel, the friends we invite into our circles.

It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier. But we’ve spent too long marvelling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our role in determining the human path. Once we cross certain thresholds — once we remake institutions such as media and publishing, once we abandon privacy — there’s no turning back, no restoring our lost individuality.

Over the generations, we’ve been through revolutions like this before. Many years ago, we delighted in the wonders of TV dinners and the other newfangled foods that suddenly filled our kitchens: slices of cheese encased in plastic, oozing pizzas that emerged from a crust of ice, bags of crunchy tater tots. In the history of man, these seemed like breakthrough innovations. Timeconsuming tasks — shopping for ingredients, tediously preparing a recipe and tackling a trail of pots and pans — were suddenly and miraculously consigned to history.

The revolution in cuisine wasn’t just enthralling. It was transformational. New products embedded themselves deeply in everyday life, so much so that it took decades for us to understand the price we paid for their convenience, efficiency and abundance. Processed foods were feats of engineering, all right — but they were engineered to make us fat. Their delectable taste required massive quantities of sodium and sizable stockpiles of sugar, which happened to reset our palates and made it harder to sate hunger. It took vast quantities of meat and corn to fabricate these dishes, and a spike in demand remade American agriculture at a terrible environmental cost. A whole new system of industrial farming emerged, with penny-conscious conglomerates cramming chickens into feces-covered pens and stuffing them full of antibiotics. By the time we came to understand the consequences of our revised patterns of consumption, the damage had been done to our waistlines, longevity, souls and planet.

Something like the midcentury food revolution is now reordering the production and consumption of knowledge. Our intellectual habits are being scrambled by the dominant firms. Giant tech companies have become the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the internet, by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to filter the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.

Such dominance endows these companies with the ability to remake the markets they control. As with the food giants, the big tech companies have given rise to a new science that aims to construct products that pander to their consumers. Unlike the market research and television ratings of the past, the tech companies have a bottomless collection of data, acquired as they track our travels across the Web, storing every shard about our habits in the hope that they may prove useful. They have compiled an intimate portrait of the psyche of each user — a portrait that they hope to exploit to seduce us into a compulsive spree of binge clicking and watching. And it works: On average, each Facebook user spends one-sixteenth of their day on the site.

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization. As news media outlets have come to depend heavily on Facebook and Google for traffic — and therefore revenue — they have rushed to produce editorials that will flourish on those platforms. This leads to a duplication of the news like never before, with scores of sites across the internet piling onto the same daily outrage. It’s why a picture of a mysteriously coloured dress generated endless articles, why seemingly every site recaps “Game of Thrones.” Each contribution to the genre adds little, except clicks. Old media had a pack mentality, too, but the internet promised something much different. And the prevalence of so much data makes the temptation to pander even greater.

This is true of politics. Our era is defined by polarization, warring ideological gangs that yield no ground. Division, however, isn’t the root cause of our unworkable system. There are many causes, but a primary problem is conformism. Facebook has nurtured two hive minds, each residing in an informational ecosystem that yields head-nodding agreement and penalizes dissenting views. This is the phenomenon that the entrepreneur and author Eli Pariser famously termed the “Filter Bubble” — how Facebook mines our data to keep giving us the news and information we crave, creating a feedback loop that pushes us deeper and deeper into our own amen corners.

As the 2016 presidential election so graphically illustrated, a hive mind is an intellectually incapacitated one, with diminishing ability to tell fact from fiction, with an unshakable bias toward party line. The Russians understood this, which is why they invested so successfully in spreading dubious agitprop via Facebook. And it’s why a raft of companies sprouted — Occupy Democrats, the Angry Patriot, Being Liberal — to get rich off the Filter Bubble and to exploit our susceptibility to the lowest-quality news, if you can call it that.

Facebook represents a dangerous deviation in media history. Once upon a time, elites proudly viewed themselves as gatekeepers. They could be sycophantic to power and snobbish, but they also felt duty-bound to elevate the standards of society and readers. Executives of Silicon Valley regard gatekeeping as the stodgy enemy of innovation — they see themselves as more neutral, scientific and responsive to the market than the elites they replaced — a perspective that obscures their own power and responsibilities. So instead of shaping public opinion, they exploit the public’s worst tendencies, its tribalism and paranoia.

During this century, we largely have treated Silicon Valley as a force beyond our control. A broad consensus held that lead-footed government could never keep pace with the dynamism of technology. By the time government acted against a tech monopoly, a kid in a garage would have already concocted some innovation to upend the market. Or, as Google’s Eric Schmidt, put it, “Competition is one click away.” A nostrum that suggested that the very structure of the internet defied our historic concern for monopoly.

As individuals, we have similarly accepted the omnipresence of the big tech companies as a fait accompli. We’ve enjoyed their free products and next-day delivery with only a nagging sense that we may be surrendering something important. Such blitheness can no longer be sustained. Privacy won’t survive the present trajectory of technology — and with the sense of being perpetually watched, humans will behave more cautiously, less subversively. Our ideas about the competitive marketplace are at risk. With a decreasing prospect of toppling the giants, entrepreneurs won’t bother to risk starting new firms, a primary source of jobs and innovation. And the proliferation of falsehoods and conspiracies through social media, the dissipation of our common basis for fact, is creating conditions ripe for authoritarianism. Over time, the long merger of man and machine has worked out pretty well for man. But we’re drifting into a new era, when that merger threatens the individual. We’re drifting toward monopoly, conformism, their machines. Perhaps it’s time we steer our course.

© 2018 Postmedia Network Inc.

CRYPTO CURIOSITY

Claire Brownwell
The Vancouver Sun

Investors who bought cryptocurrencies early on faced plenty of doubters, but today they’re laughing all the way to the bank.

The price of bitcoin has had plenty of ups and downs during its turbulent history, but if you bought and held $1,000 worth of the currency five years ago and sold it on Monday, you would have about $374,000 today.

In July, Bloomberg reported that an unknown trader turned a US$55-million investment in ether, the digital currency powering the Ethereum blockchain, into US$283 million over the course of a month.

Over the past three months, the collective market capitalization of the 800-odd cryptocurrencies in existence has increased to US$146.5 billion on Sept. 11, from about US$25 billion on April 1.

Despite the huge increase in value, mainstream consumers have yet to take to these digital assets in significant numbers. To the average person, cryptocurrencies remain confusing and unfamiliar.

If you think that’s going to change and you see room for cryptocurrency valuations to climb even higher, here’s a guide to buying and trading bitcoin, ether and the hundreds of others in existence. Before you get too carried away, we have some notes of caution as well.

BUYING BITCOIN

Bitcoin made it theoretically possible for two parties to exchange digital value without requiring a bank, government or third party. In practice, it’s not quite that simple.

For one thing, we all get paid in currencies issued by central banks, not bitcoin, which means investors need a way to convert their money into a cryptocurrency, which usually means buying it through an exchange.

Canadian investors have an additional challenge: It can be hard to find a cryptocurrency exchange that accepts loonies. Canada’s Quadriga lets investors buy bitcoin using Interac online, an electronic funds transfer or a bank wire, but

requires account and identity verification in some cases.

If, in the spirit of things, you’d rather keep your bank account out of the transaction, a bitcoin ATM might be the way to go. Available in cities across the country, bitcoin ATMs allow you to deposit cash in exchange for cryptocurrency, albeit for higher fees than an exchange would charge.

Once you’ve made the transaction, congratulations, you now own bitcoin, which you can prove is yours thanks to a shared digital ledger called the blockchain. The exchange or bitcoin ATM will have issued you a bitcoin address, which is like an email address people can use to send you money.

If you want to send money to other people, you need one more thing: a private key, similar to the password you would need to open up your email account.

Private keys are issued by pieces of software called bitcoin wallets and provide mathematical proof that transactions came from a wallet’s owner. Simply choose a bitcoin wallet provider and download its app on your smartphone.

The most common way to explain bitcoin wallets is to describe them as similar to bank accounts, but that’s misleading, said Anthony Di Iorio, chief executive and co-founder of Jaxx, a multicryptocurrency wallet.

Unlike a bank account — or a physical wallet — bitcoin wallets don’t “hold” your money. Your bitcoins are stored on the blockchain, with the bitcoin wallet simply facilitating transactions.

Some wallets manage your private key on their servers, while others give you the option of storing it yourself in a file, hardware wallet or paper wallet to keep your bitcoins safe if the wallet gets hacked.

“We’re a world wallet that doesn’t hold onto people’s money,” Di Iorio said. “You are personally responsible for securing your key.”

WHAT ABOUT OTHER CRYPTOCURRENCIES?

Bitcoin is the best-known cryptocurrency, but there are 800-plus

others out there.

Some were invented to solve problems with bitcoin, some provide a specific function such as giving a user access to cloud storage, and some act to certify equity ownership in a startup.

At US$27.9 billion, Ethereum has the second-largest market capitalization next to Bitcoin. It’s growing so quickly, however, that many cryptocurrency watchers are predicting Ethereum will one day dethrone Bitcoin in a reversal they refer to as the “flippening.”

Invented by a University of Waterloo dropout, Ethereum has a flexible programming model that allows developers to use its blockchain to make decentralized applications and self-executing “smart contracts.”

An alliance of major corporations and financial institutions is working together to study potential uses for Ethereum.

The third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is Bitcoin Cash and it’s just a monthand-a-half old.

Bitcoin Cash is the result of a bitter, years-long dispute over how to handle the growing number of transactions as bitcoin becomes more popular.

Some people didn’t like the technical

fix implemented by bitcoin’s core developers, so they copied the cryptocurrency’s code, gave every owner of bitcoin an equal number of Bitcoin Cash tokens and launched a competing version using their preferred solution to the scaling problem.

Other popular cryptocurrencies include: Ripple, which provides the technological infrastructure for financial settlements; Litecoin, an alternative to Bitcoin launched with the intention of creating a “silver to Bitcoin’s gold;” and Dash, a cryptocurrency that focuses on providing quick and anonymous transactions.

BUYING OTHER CRYPTOCURRENCIES

Let’s say you think Ripple’s financial settlement infrastructure technology is about to take off, or you want to send and accept digital tips in Dogecoin. The Jaxx wallet lets you trade 15 different cryptocurrencies within the app, while wallets associated with cryptocurrency exchanges can hold and exchange a variety of tokens.

Di Iorio said the massive increase in cryptocurrency value in recent months has inspired a lot of new users to sign up for Jaxx, putting the company on track to pull in $1 billion in sales in this year. Jaxx now has about 500,000 users.

“It’s booming,” Di Iorio said. “It’s been crazy.”

If you want to invest in a brand new cryptocurrency, it’s possible to do so through an initial coin offering, or ICO.

For example, Waterloo, Ont.based messaging app Kik just launched an ICO with its cryptocurrency called Kin in the hopes it will increase in value as users earn it and trade it.

Sid Kalla, a researcher with Smith + Crown, a cryptofinance analyst, said it’s important to do your research before investing in any cryptocurrency, but ICOs require even more scrutiny.

Because valuations are so high right now, it’s become possible for untested entrepreneurs with halfbaked ideas to raise a lot of money

they don’t necessarily deserve.

“It’s hard to pick good winners, because the good projects have valuations that go up very high, which limits how much upside potential you could have,” Kalla said. “Like any bubble, you don’t know where the top is.”

BUYER BEWARE

Simply put, cryptocurrencies are not for you if you want a dependable, low-risk investment that allows you to sleep well at night.

For instance, over the course of a weekend from Sept. 7 to Sept. 11, Bitcoin lost eight per cent of its value following news that the Chinese government plans to shut down the country’s cryptocurrency exchanges.

The volatility of cryptocurrencies is “like penny stocks squared,” Kalla said.

“You have to ask yourself, what is the reason for investing? If the reason is, ‘I think Ethereum is going to go up in price 20 per cent by the end of this month,’ then I would say don’t buy it,” he said. “Even if you think this is going to be the next big thing, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the next big thing next year.”

If you do manage to quadruple your money in a month, remember you owe the taxman his cut. The Canada Revenue Agency has made it clear it considers such profits to be capital gains, 50 per cent of which are taxable.

Jamie Golombek, managing director of tax and estate planning at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, said the anonymous nature of cryptocurrency trading won’t help if the CRA starts asking questions about where you got the money for that fancy new car.

“If someone tries to convert a substantial amount of bitcoin into real currency — like Canadian dollars — presumably there will be a record of that and the CRA may ask where that money came from,” Golombek said. “Not reporting it is tax evasion and it’s illegal.”

© 2017 Postmedia Network Inc

The giants of technology keep inventing ways to control our lives. Franklin Foer fears we?ll hit a point where we won?t be able to recover the individuality that?s been taken away.

The Vancouver Sun

Until recently, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations. Any third-grader could describe their essence. Exxon sells oil; McDonald’s makes hamburgers; Walmart is a place to buy stuff. This is no longer so.

Today’s ascendant monopolies aspire to encompass all of existence. Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow. They now aim to build driverless cars, manufacture phones and conquer death. Amazon, which once called itself “the everything store,” now produces television shows, owns Whole Foods and powers the cloud. The architect of this firm, Jeff Bezos, even owns the Washington Post.

Along with Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, these companies are in a race to become our “personal assistant.” They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through our days and never quite leave our sides. They aspire to become the repository for precious and private items, our calendars and contacts, our photos and documents. They intend for us to turn unthinkingly to them for information and entertainment while they catalogue our intentions and aversions. Google Glass and the Apple Watch prefigure the day when these companies implant their artificial intelligence in our bodies. Brin has mused, “Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”

More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mould humanity into their desired image of it. They think they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine — to redirect the trajectory of human evolution. How do I know this? In annual addresses and town hall meetings, the Founding Fathers of these companies often make big, bold pronouncements about human nature — a view that they intend for the rest of us to adhere to. Page thinks the human body amounts to a basic piece of code. “Your program algorithms aren’t that complicated,” he says. And if humans function like computers, why not hasten the day we become fully cyborg? To take another grand theory, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has exclaimed his desire to liberate humanity from phoniness, to end the dishonesty of secrets.

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” he has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Of course, that’s both an expression of idealism and an elaborate justification for Facebook’s business model.

There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there. But if you listen hard to the titans of tech, it’s clear that their world view is something much closer to the opposite of a libertarian’s veneration of the heroic, solitary individual. The big tech companies think we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbour a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole. (“Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community,” Zuckerberg wrote in one of his many manifestos.) By stitching the world together, they can cure its ills.

Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the “user” — but their world view rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling, a passive, bureaucratic description of us.

The big tech companies (the Europeans have lumped them together as GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are shredding the principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their hostility toward intellectual property.

In the realm of economics, they justify monopoly by suggesting that competition merely distracts from the important problems like erasing language barriers and building artificial brains. Companies should “transcend the daily brute struggle for survival,” as Facebook investor Peter Theil has put it.

When it comes to the most central tenet of individualism — free will — the tech companies have a different way. They hope to automate the choices, both large and small, we make as we float through the day. It’s their algorithms that suggest the news we read, the goods we buy, the paths we travel, the friends we invite into our circles.

It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier. But we’ve spent too long marvelling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our role in determining the human path. Once we cross certain thresholds — once we remake institutions such as media and publishing, once we abandon privacy — there’s no turning back, no restoring our lost individuality.

Over the generations, we’ve been through revolutions like this before. Many years ago, we delighted in the wonders of TV dinners and the other newfangled foods that suddenly filled our kitchens: slices of cheese encased in plastic, oozing pizzas that emerged from a crust of ice, bags of crunchy tater tots. In the history of man, these seemed like breakthrough innovations. Timeconsuming tasks — shopping for ingredients, tediously preparing a recipe and tackling a trail of pots and pans — were suddenly and miraculously consigned to history.

The revolution in cuisine wasn’t just enthralling. It was transformational. New products embedded themselves deeply in everyday life, so much so that it took decades for us to understand the price we paid for their convenience, efficiency and abundance. Processed foods were feats of engineering, all right — but they were engineered to make us fat. Their delectable taste required massive quantities of sodium and sizable stockpiles of sugar, which happened to reset our palates and made it harder to sate hunger. It took vast quantities of meat and corn to fabricate these dishes, and a spike in demand remade American agriculture at a terrible environmental cost. A whole new system of industrial farming emerged, with penny-conscious conglomerates cramming chickens into feces-covered pens and stuffing them full of antibiotics. By the time we came to understand the consequences of our revised patterns of consumption, the damage had been done to our waistlines, longevity, souls and planet.

Something like the midcentury food revolution is now reordering the production and consumption of knowledge. Our intellectual habits are being scrambled by the dominant firms. Giant tech companies have become the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the internet, by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to filter the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.

Such dominance endows these companies with the ability to remake the markets they control. As with the food giants, the big tech companies have given rise to a new science that aims to construct products that pander to their consumers. Unlike the market research and television ratings of the past, the tech companies have a bottomless collection of data, acquired as they track our travels across the Web, storing every shard about our habits in the hope that they may prove useful. They have compiled an intimate portrait of the psyche of each user — a portrait that they hope to exploit to seduce us into a compulsive spree of binge clicking and watching. And it works: On average, each Facebook user spends one-sixteenth of their day on the site.

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization. As news media outlets have come to depend heavily on Facebook and Google for traffic — and therefore revenue — they have rushed to produce editorials that will flourish on those platforms. This leads to a duplication of the news like never before, with scores of sites across the internet piling onto the same daily outrage. It’s why a picture of a mysteriously coloured dress generated endless articles, why seemingly every site recaps “Game of Thrones.” Each contribution to the genre adds little, except clicks. Old media had a pack mentality, too, but the internet promised something much different. And the prevalence of so much data makes the temptation to pander even greater.

This is true of politics. Our era is defined by polarization, warring ideological gangs that yield no ground. Division, however, isn’t the root cause of our unworkable system. There are many causes, but a primary problem is conformism. Facebook has nurtured two hive minds, each residing in an informational ecosystem that yields head-nodding agreement and penalizes dissenting views. This is the phenomenon that the entrepreneur and author Eli Pariser famously termed the “Filter Bubble” — how Facebook mines our data to keep giving us the news and information we crave, creating a feedback loop that pushes us deeper and deeper into our own amen corners.

As the 2016 presidential election so graphically illustrated, a hive mind is an intellectually incapacitated one, with diminishing ability to tell fact from fiction, with an unshakable bias toward party line. The Russians understood this, which is why they invested so successfully in spreading dubious agitprop via Facebook. And it’s why a raft of companies sprouted — Occupy Democrats, the Angry Patriot, Being Liberal — to get rich off the Filter Bubble and to exploit our susceptibility to the lowest-quality news, if you can call it that.

Facebook represents a dangerous deviation in media history. Once upon a time, elites proudly viewed themselves as gatekeepers. They could be sycophantic to power and snobbish, but they also felt duty-bound to elevate the standards of society and readers. Executives of Silicon Valley regard gatekeeping as the stodgy enemy of innovation — they see themselves as more neutral, scientific and responsive to the market than the elites they replaced — a perspective that obscures their own power and responsibilities. So instead of shaping public opinion, they exploit the public’s worst tendencies, its tribalism and paranoia.

During this century, we largely have treated Silicon Valley as a force beyond our control. A broad consensus held that lead-footed government could never keep pace with the dynamism of technology. By the time government acted against a tech monopoly, a kid in a garage would have already concocted some innovation to upend the market. Or, as Google’s Eric Schmidt, put it, “Competition is one click away.” A nostrum that suggested that the very structure of the internet defied our historic concern for monopoly.

As individuals, we have similarly accepted the omnipresence of the big tech companies as a fait accompli. We’ve enjoyed their free products and next-day delivery with only a nagging sense that we may be surrendering something important. Such blitheness can no longer be sustained. Privacy won’t survive the present trajectory of technology — and with the sense of being perpetually watched, humans will behave more cautiously, less subversively. Our ideas about the competitive marketplace are at risk. With a decreasing prospect of toppling the giants, entrepreneurs won’t bother to risk starting new firms, a primary source of jobs and innovation. And the proliferation of falsehoods and conspiracies through social media, the dissipation of our common basis for fact, is creating conditions ripe for authoritarianism. Over time, the long merger of man and machine has worked out pretty well for man. But we’re drifting into a new era, when that merger threatens the individual. We’re drifting toward monopoly, conformism, their machines. Perhaps it’s time we steer our course.

© 2017 Postmedia Network Inc.