Leave the world behind a movie or an inevitable future?

The new movie “Leave_the_world_behind ” achieved great success on the Netflix platform, reaching first place on the list of most watched works. Starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon, Ethan Hawke, Mihala Herold and Josh Dernan.

 The initial sign of trouble in the film is when the characters realize they have no cell phone signal and their #internet is down. However, they will not realize that an attack has occurred until they receive a notification on their television screens, in addition to another alarming indicator of the spread of chaos: an oil tanker running aground due to a breakdown in navigation systems. Later, we see planes crashing in the sky, a reminder of the panic of the year 2000, when people worried that #computers might misinterpret the two zeros in 2000 as 1900, which some thought would disrupt everything from… Navigation systems to energy infrastructure. This never happened, largely because many people behind the scenes were working hard, but failures occurred internationally when 15 nuclear reactors shut down, power went out in Hawaii, and government computers crashed in China and Hong Kong.

An outage in the UK’s air traffic control systems in August 2023, which grounded flights, underscored our dependence on computers. This incident, along with other smaller-scale disturbances, revealed the potential for widespread impact. It took several days for National Air Traffic Controllers ( NATS ) to solve the problem. However, the situation showed that effective early warning systems and emergency plans are in place, preventing extreme outcomes such as plane crashes as shown in the film.

However, this is not to downplay how interconnected our systems are today—in a way that is more complex than they were during the bug concerns of the third millennium. Nearly 15 years ago, the United Kingdom took an approach in its National Cybersecurity Strategy that prioritized the continuity of government computer systems over all others.

“It was wrong in 2009 because we completely ignored the fact that a large part of the economy was already virtual, and that “It will increase.”

While Nasbacher left office in 2010, from an outside observer’s perspective, she says attitudes haven’t changed much since then, adding: “We haven’t made much change since then.”

However, the probability of a large-scale cyberattack is very small, believes Kieran Martin, an expert in this field at the Blavatnik School of Government, who served as the first chief executive of the UK’s National Cyber ​​Security Center until August 2020. “The chances of a #electronic_attack of this magnitude occurring without a clear announcement of an escalation in hostility or conflicts are very weak.”

“However, if one part of the national infrastructure is a hard target, the attacker will look for soft targets,” Nasbacher adds. “The government has entered into special agreements with certain service providers to ensure that there is not even a single point of failure.”

Outages may include aspects that affect ordinary people, such as your Internet connection and perhaps your mobile phone service, which people resort to because they cannot use fast #Internet. However, emergency services will still work – after the terrorist attack on London on July 7, 2005, the government realized that emergency responders could not use the same network as the general public. Emergency services will use a new system called the Emergency Services Network, which is separate from the main public communications network.

Recently, there has been a focus on landline telephone services, particularly their analog value and utility during a #cyberattack (Analog telephone systems transmit audio signals in the form of continuous electrical waves over copper wires. These characteristics include the way the signal is transmitted and processed and the infrastructure that supports it, such as the Separate power and copper wire network). “We’re taking a step back by shutting down the simple old phone system, which was an independent network, running separately and having its own copper infrastructure,” says Alan Woodward, professor of #cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. BT and other phone providers are going a long way in migrating their services from traditional copper wires to digital alternatives, powered by Voice over Internet Protocol ( VoIP ) technology – the same technology that powers Skype. However, the phone company says it has contingency plans in place to keep services running in the event of a risk event and that it communicates regularly with the government to maintain security.

One of the most exciting scenes in the film is seeing Tesla’s self-driving electric cars drifting on the roads. This scene angered Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who immediately posted on the “X” website, “formerly” Twitter, that electric cars like his are still able to work even if the power goes out. Musk wrote: “Tesla cars can be charged by solar panels even if the world completely turns into a version of what we see in the Mad Max movies and there is no longer gasoline!”

It is not entirely known whether the other 850,000 or so electric cars on the country’s roads, estimated by the Royal Automobile Club, can be charged with solar energy. However, Nassbacher says the idea of ​​cars or ships heading in the wrong direction is not far-fetched. “If a widely available sat-nav product is changed very slightly to create confusion, the impact can be significant,” she says. Of course, humans can get around this simply by ignoring directions and following conventional plans.

What the film shows, and the gradual decline of our digital lives in real life, is how important #technology and the Internet are to the way we live today. “It’s important to realize that as we hand over more control of our world to #technology, driven by all the good reasons, those dependencies become more severe,” Nasbacher says. “Even if we are well prepared, we may find ourselves facing enormous difficulties.”

Will the movie #leave_the_world_behind prepare me psychologically for a future controlled by technology and the digital ills that follow?