Roberta Anderson is the CISO of Onterris, an environmental services company that works around the world on oil and gas emissions, clean water, and clean air. She leads the overall cybersecurity strategy, has worked at companies that handle protected health information and military and government information, and is the author of Breaking the Firewall, a book on how women in cybersecurity move from entry level to the C-suite. Roberta and Matthew discuss the pressure that comes with CISO roles, why security fundamentals still hold in the age of AI, and how to use AI responsibly. They also look ahead to what AI could mean for work, purpose, and the next generation. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Why every CISO role carries its own stressors, public company or private
• Why Roberta calls the AI panic a new Chicken Little and holds that fundamentals have not changed
• How vulnerability management, patching, governance, and third party risk still apply
• Why companies, users, and even AI companies are putting the cart before the horse
• Why guardrails and clear instructions matter more than blaming the tool
• How human error and machine error compare when tools learn from patterns
• Why separation of duties still matters when AI checks AI
• What AI could mean for purpose, creativity, and the next generation
  
  
  

In this episode…

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by CyberLynx.

CyberLynx is a Bethesda managed IT and cybersecurity company. Local techs you know, not a call center. Month-to-month. 24/7 intrusion detection.

We help growing companies with managed IT, help desk, backup and recovery, and a fractional CIO.

Talk to us at https://cyberlynx.com/contact, info@cyberlynx.com, or 301-798-9170.

Check out previous episodes:

Defense in Depth for AI: Fundamentals, Tools, and People with James Hengsterman-Cash - Ep 251 

Everybody Has an AI Idea and a Tool, but Not Every Shoe Fits with Steve Goudreau - Ep 250

Smart People Know You Can’t Just Let AI Do Everything with Brian Walters - Ep 249

Transcript: 

Cyber Business Podcast

Cyber Business Podcast

Guest: Roberta Anderson, CISO at Onterris Host: Matthew Connor

Matthew Connor: Matthew Connor here, host of the Cyber Business Podcast. Today we're joined by Roberta Anderson, CISO at Onterris and the author of Breaking the Firewall. Roberta, welcome to the show.

Roberta Anderson: Thank you, Matthew. It's nice to be here.

Matthew Connor: It is nice to have you. I am so excited about today's episode. But before we get into it, a quick word from our sponsor.

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Matthew Connor: And now back to our show. Roberta, for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us about Onterris and your role there as CISO?

Roberta Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. Onterris is an environmental services company. We're doing a lot of great stuff around the world to help make things better for the environment. Think about oil and gas, making sure there aren't bad emissions out there, looking at clean water, clean air. My role as the CISO is to set the overall cybersecurity strategy, keep the company safe, and keep things going well from a cybersecurity perspective.

Matthew Connor: I love it. And it's so easy being the CISO at a publicly traded company. I'm sure no regulations, no pressure there. You've got it easy. I'm always shocked by that, because I imagine the pressure really kind of doubles when you've got that. There are so many more eyes. Everything is more regulated. I know it's not the CFO role, but I think at that level there's that extra stress and pressure because it's publicly traded and not a private company where you really only have to answer to private people. Would you say that's about right?

Roberta Anderson: I've always taken every role extremely seriously, whether it's private or public. I've worked at private companies that were telehealth medical companies where I was handling PHI, and that's extremely stressful because you're talking about people's medical information. I've worked at private companies that were still dealing with military information in the government, and that's extremely stressful because you're literally dealing with people's lives. So I think every CISO role has its own stressors. In a publicly traded company, you're reporting up to the board, you have SOX compliance, you have different regulatory things. But I don't know that one is more stressful than the other simply because it's publicly traded. Obviously there are different stressors, because you have your shareholders, you have the board, you have different regulations. But I'd say it's just different stressors, not one being taken more seriously than the other, or having more stress because it's public. It's just different.

Matthew Connor: Yeah, makes perfect sense. Well, let me ask you, as long as we're on the topic of stressors, a lot of people tend to get stressed by the sheer speed of advancement of AI these days, right? I think that's fair. However, I also think we're at a really interesting inflection point with AI, now being the end of September of 2026. It is a lot different than it was four years ago when it first came out with ChatGPT. I'm curious, do you find that AI has become, at least for the CISO and for compliance, one of these things that really helps you go through the SSP, the plans, everything, and understand it and digest it and alleviate some of that pressure? Or is it something that's probably not so much for you? What's your take on AI as it stands now?

Roberta Anderson: I love that you brought this question up. I'm so excited that you brought this up. There are two angles to what you just brought up, one about AI being a stressor and one about AI being helpful. I'm going to caveat this: I am a huge fan of AI. One of my earlier books, because I have a later book, is AI in the Digital Age. I think AI is great when used appropriately.

One thing people get caught up with, and this could be a danger zone kind of statement that I'm going to make, and not everyone agrees with it, is that AI is almost like a new Chicken Little. It's like, "Oh, AI, we have to hurry. AI is making everything so scary now. AI, we have to change everything." I am not a proponent of that frame of thought. I think that obviously, yes, AI is making things light years faster, but we can still stand by our fundamentals. AI isn't changing the fact that we need vulnerability management. AI isn't changing the fact that we need to patch. AI isn't changing the fact that we need governance. AI isn't changing the fact that we need third-party risk management. All AI is doing is making vulnerabilities that were already existing easier to exploit. It's making vulnerabilities that were already existing faster to exploit. It's making things that you should have been doing before a lot more obvious when you don't do them. So I'm a huge proponent of the fundamentals don't change. They're still fundamentals. You just need to, A, do what you should have been doing, and B, do it faster.

Another thing, to your point: yes, we should use AI, but we should use it in a responsible manner. A big part of the issue now is that a lot of companies, people, and even the AI companies are putting the cart before the horse with AI. Some of my background is medicine. If you think about AI, it's literally neural pathways. If you think about how the human brain works, and AI is functioning in a psychology and sociology manner, what do we need to do with that? You can't just let an underdeveloped brain loose. You need to put guardrails in place. If you think about it like a child, if you have a gifted child or a 2-year-old, what happens when you sit a 2-year-old alone in a room? Disaster, like anyone who has a young child knows. A disaster is going to happen if you have a very smart child and you tell them to do a task but you don't tell them how you want that task done. Don't be surprised when something goes wrong with said task. Hugging Face [unclear]. Why is everyone surprised when it went outside of the bounds that, in your mind, you expected, but you didn't give instructions? So I feel like in one aspect, people are blaming the tool, but you didn't train the tool to do what you expected.

Matthew Connor: I couldn't agree more, and I am right there with you. I think part of the blame, and the reason we're seeing it, and it may be a hot take, maybe I'm wrong, is that this is a smokescreen for "please don't punish us." Because the reality is, when that happens, like Hugging Face, you've committed, in some cases crimes have been committed. When you end up creating a tool that you let loose and it commits a crime, a felony, hacking into some system, you have done that. You can't blame the gun for the murder. You can't say, "It wasn't Smith & Wesson. It wasn't me." You were the one who pulled the trigger. You set the bullet free. The fact that it struck a body, you can't say, "Well, that's the bullet's fault and the gun's fault, and we need more regulations to control these guns, but don't blame me." Are you kidding me? You shot somebody. "Oh, no, no, no, we just need help, because I just discovered this gun," and we're like, oh boy, look, bang. OK, come on. Am I the only one seeing this stuff? You're going to smoke and mirrors us into believing that? "Oh yes, let's regulate the gun."

Roberta Anderson: No, yeah, don't blame the tool. Blame the architect and the user of the tool. The tool did what the tool was designed to do. You need to design it better.

Matthew Connor: Yes, thank you. I couldn't agree more. And I really do hope that people start catching on to that and say, this is all nonsense. And furthermore, I think this is a plan. If I end up dead after this, we know that now big AI is taking people. I wouldn't put it past OpenAI. They may have already started doing that. But what's really interesting is that, beyond "don't punish us for the felonies that we're committing," it is also a play on the closed systems to say, how do we stop the open-weight models and the open source models? How do we keep them from basically eating our lunch? Because as the hardware gets better, and we've seen it start very rapidly, you can now, for basically 5 grand to 20 grand, have an amazing system on your desktop that is running a very capable AI system, which was not possible a year ago, let alone two years ago, let alone four years ago.

So as all these closed model systems were developing great frontier models, it's fantastic. You need our big data center power in order to be able to use it. Fantastic. You've got your [unclear]. People can't easily do that. However, now for five grand you can have a capable AI model on your desktop, and now it's like, oh, wow, OK, hold up. And now the models are getting more efficient, they're getting lighter, the hardware's getting better. So I think, beyond just "don't punish me for the felonies that I've committed," it's also a play to say, "Hey, wait, we need regulation for our closed models. You have to hold us to account to say you can't use these models for these crimes. You can't use it to hack into places. You can't use it to find vulnerabilities. So we'll work with you to do that." Oh, wait, what are you going to do with those open source systems? You can't regulate them the same way. We should probably shut that down. I think that's the play that's going on right now. And I think it's dangerous.

Roberta Anderson: I think so too. And I think it's too late. That again is the point about the cart before the horse. They had this cool thing and they got so excited. It's a perfect example. And that's why history is so important. In so many cases, you're doomed to repeat it when you don't pay attention to it, and we just do this all the time with so many things. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's out there now, and I'm not sure that we can, and I'm not saying we should stop AI. That's not what I'm saying. But to your point, we have all these systems out there. I'm not sure that we can stop and try to grandfather-regulate what's out there. We have geniuses out there that know how to evade the law. How do we stop that?

Matthew Connor: I totally agree. And I think the issue, beyond the attempt to regulate them into "you have to use our systems," which I think is the play, is "You have to use our closed systems because it's the only safe and legitimate way." The genie can't go back in the bottle. However, because you have open systems now, let's say you've got a decent open system that people can use for cybercrime. Cool, they are using it. We know that's happening. Great, I don't care. I think that's great, because as long as the good guys are also doing it and using AI to secure it, there is more money on the good side for developing the frontier models and everything, so we get first mover advantage. The challenge is that the bad guys only have to be right once, and the good guys have to be right all the time.

But because we've got more money, more funding, and more advanced models on the good side, I think what we are going to see, and we see this in products like Darktrace Network, is basically machine learning watching the whole network to say, "Hey, wait, that's not normal," and stopping something. So in a day where we have this rapid zero-day exploit, this is the type of product we're going to see more of, smarter, better, faster, where it's like, "I don't care that we didn't patch. It doesn't matter. I don't care that you found a zero-day exploit. You know why? Because all of our systems are monitored and protected using various forms of AI to where it doesn't matter how you came in." We're not doing the old "it's got to be this particular thing. We're going to use these rules, and if you violate this rule, then I know that you are..." That doesn't matter now. With AI we can say, "Oh, this is not normal. I'm going to stop that. We'll investigate it." Cool. I think that's where we go, and that's why it doesn't matter what the bad guys do. We have to proliferate that sort of technology on the good guy side. That's the challenge. But once we do, game on, let's go. I don't care. Poke holes in it, come through, boom, we're going to pick you up. You do have to have the fundamentals in place, back to your earlier point, but our stopgap, our last line of defense, is RoboCop.

Roberta Anderson: OK, it changes. I think you're right. I think it will have to move to a more heuristic-based, behavioral-based approach, not just "you don't have this patch." Honestly, let's be real, patching has been broken for decades. It just hasn't worked. There are certain basics that need to be there, but you know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different. Patching has really never quite worked, let's be real. So I think you're right. We need to evolve. That's the whole principle of technology, and we realistically are in another technological revolution.

Now, devil's advocate, to your point: if we don't have the right guardrails in place, that can 100% be exploited. It just takes one data poisoning, one neural network poisoning. And this isn't like, "Oh, Roberta, [unclear], you're thinking so crazy outside the box." It's very easy. If we're having the AI system of any enterprise say, "OK, we're looking at behavior," all you have to do is manipulate what it sees as behavior. Then you can infiltrate an entire network, have it do malicious intent, get in there, poison everything, and take charge of the entire network, because it's just going off of patterns. That's all the AI is doing. It's saying, "This is the pattern. This is what I see as legitimate." So all you have to do is poison it, give it examples of malicious activity. Now it recognizes that as legitimate activity, and all of a sudden you can get into an entire network doing whatever you want. All you have to do is retrain it to believe that that's a legitimate pattern.

Matthew Connor: I think this is really fascinating, because the same thing applies with a traditional security tool. Say, because of alert fatigue, or you just accidentally say, "Oh, I'm going to allow this thing." You get some alert, doesn't matter what it is, and you say allow this thing to happen. You were wrong, and now that bad thing happens and there's this way in, and we'll chalk that up as human error. But when you go to the computer side, it's like, "Well, computers aren't allowed to make mistakes." OK, but we get to this really funny place where we're training computers to be like humans, to learn through pattern recognition, because that's what we do. It's eerily similar. There aren't that many differences, other than currently we're not using biological systems to do this, although some people are starting to do that and it's wild. In any event, it doesn't really matter, because at the end of the day I don't think any system will ever be fully infallible. But what's really cool, going back to your example before, is that on a traditional system a human can accidentally, whoops, allow something to happen. It happens all the time, and that's how it gets in.

I think where we go in the future, since AI is so new and we tend to think of it as this one system, right? So you have one security product, because we're used to thinking in those terms. However, with everything now it's sub-agents. So when I'm looking at, let's just say, network, and this is happening, there should be, and I'm sure will be as we evolve with this AI thinking, a "Wait, I need to always be checking these things. I need another sub-agent checking my work: was this right?" And then checking that, and always checking. As it currently stands, if you're using a frontier model, it's probably not the right model for this particular work, and when you start gobbling up tons of tokens, the tokenomics of it don't work. However, I think we're going to see in the future the right-fit model for whatever that is. So let's go back to that security product. It's checking the network and it says, "Oh, hey, I think this is fine. I'm going to let this go." Another sub-agent, using some other model, checks that work, another one checks that one, and it continues. Now you've got basically a team of AI working on every little thing. I think the economics will work on that, because we're starting to see it now. You don't do everything in Fable 5.1. It doesn't make sense, right? Then you get new models that are super efficient. They can do this: you do the sorting, and then you do this, because it fits. I think that's going to become more natural and built in, and you will have various models being used. Right now we're kind of at that one layer, but I think as it matures, that's how it matures. It's not just machine learning. It'll be machine learning and an LLM and different sub-agents, all of this, to say, "Now we've got this powerful system that is really working."

And I think we can then, kind of like self-driving cars, now it is eight times safer than a human. And I get it, because of the reflexes. It takes .12 seconds for the car to see something and react. I'm not that fast. The Formula One drivers are not that fast. Nobody's that fast. So we can't keep up. I think the same will happen on the cybersecurity side, where it's like, "Yeah, look at all this data flowing in." You can't keep up. Nobody can keep up with that. I think that's where we go.

Roberta Anderson: To your point, and I think you're right, that also goes to my statement about the fundamentals. Fundamentally, we have segregation of duties, and I think that's where people aren't ready to get on board with it yet, because we don't have that. It's one system that's doing everything, which can easily have collusion, and we've seen examples where the AI has colluded. So I think that's why people aren't necessarily super [unclear]. Because it's still relatively new, people aren't comfortable getting completely on board with it yet, because even when people say AI checking AI, it's usually still the same AI checking itself. We want to have that separation of duties. Especially in SOX controls, we need to prevent collusion. So I think if we can have truly segregated tools checking each other, that definitely will provide comfort.

I love your example about the autonomous vehicles because my daughter, where she goes to college, which we talked about, our daughters, before, we have the Waymos and we're using them all the time. Even some people approached us after we got out and they're very uncomfortable with it. I personally am comfortable with it, and I'm more comfortable with my daughter taking Waymos than Ubers, especially when it's late. It's like a teen by herself, there's no driver, and you don't have to worry about whether the driver is under the influence. Is the driver a creepo? So I prefer her taking Waymos over taking an Uber, 1000%. Sure, there have been stories about Waymos going through crime scenes or whatever, but that's not very common, and they can be programmed not to. But look at all the instances of drunk drivers, drivers getting in accidents, drivers being criminals or creepos. I would prefer the self-driving car over some rando dude driving my daughter all day, every day.

Matthew Connor: Could not agree more. It's one of those things, kind of like the telephone operator. Great job back in the day. My mom loved being a telephone operator, back in the 70s and 80s. It made sense in the early days. Now it's a ridiculous proposition. How would that even work in the day of VoIP? "OK, so we're going to funnel it through people to keep them employed." It makes no sense. It would slow everything down. I think the same goes for drivers. It won't make sense. You're so dangerous, even on your best day, you're not even close to the autonomous vehicle. We're there now, even though regulatory-wise we're not, because people are still iffy and the technology is just now getting to that. Tesla released their stats, and it was like 1.8 billion hours driven on Full Self-Driving, and they found that it was eight times safer. For sure, I believe it, because we've been using Tesla for about 10 years now and gotten to see the evolution, and it has saved our butts so many times. I don't drive now. It is ridiculous. I tell this story a lot, but about almost two months ago we were coming back from New York. I'm the driver in the fast lane, the left lane, and there's a median to our left. The vehicle to our right didn't see us or something, but it comes over so fast. Thankfully we were on Full Self-Driving, because there was just no way for me to react. The car slows down ever so slightly. It danced. It moved in sync with the other car, like they were tethered together. It was amazing how fast this happened, and by the time I could even react, it was all over. It slowed down, moved over, didn't slam on the brakes, didn't overcorrect into the median, and it reacted in time. That car would have slammed right into the side of us had I been driving. And then we hit the median, it would have been a disaster. It was so fast. I was like, oh, I'm done driving. That is it. I'm done. I don't drive anymore. I put on Full Self-Driving and we go and it's amazing.

And yet we're not at the point today where you could just say, "Yeah, you just go full self," we're early for that. Just like we're early on the AI side. Everybody knows from science fiction that that's the future of these self-driving cars. Nobody's driving, and it's ridiculous because you see them going real fast and humans can't keep up.

But in the business world and the cybersecurity world, I see it the same way with everything. I'm curious, because there's the cycle, there's the psychology of it, of people not wanting to let go. We're still early days, but you've got to adopt this technology, you've got to use it, and I think there's resistance to it for a lot of the similar reasons. People like driving. We got into tech because we like the technology, we love the things. So people don't want to let go, but I think our days are numbered, not like people won't be working. Let me clarify. It's not people. I think the landscape changes so drastically that our job is going to be fully leveraging AI in everything, to where we're managing it. Stop clicking on things in the firewall, stop doing the settings, because you know what? You're slow and you're human and you make mistakes and you don't understand all of the things. It takes five seconds, and I don't know why I snapped and said five seconds, but it takes no time for the AI to fully understand how that firewall works, all the settings and everything, and then choose the right things. And yet even a fully trained person who's up to speed says, "Oh well, this update, let me go search it and find it." No, I misunderstood the instructions. Come on. We're there today. And I think people still struggle with letting go and saying, "You know what, I'm just going to use the AI to help me go through this, make sure I get this right." I think people still struggle with that.

Roberta Anderson: There's a lot to unpack with what you said. Do you remember the movie WALL-E?

Matthew Connor: Love it.

Roberta Anderson: I do too. But do you remember what happened when they gave all control over to technology, and what happened to humans? For the listeners and watchers who might not remember, they got fat, they got lazy, they forgot a lot of everything. They literally got to the point where they weren't walking, they were using tech for everything, they weren't using their brains. So to your point about the psychology, human nature is to preserve. There are so many different components to the AI tech boom. It's not just about the tech. On the surface it's about the tech, it's about innovation, and then you pull in people's fear of losing their jobs and being replaced. But then there's that larger piece about the self, the identity. And when people are using AI to do things, they're no longer using their cognitive function. "Oh, I'll just have AI do it." And then you're not actually thinking. Depending on what it is, you're no longer using those motor skills.

There's a lot to unpack with that, because there's a balance. Some people are of the opinion, good, bad, or indifferent, that with the influx of AI it's actually decreasing our mental capacity and we're not using our brains as much. If we keep going down this path, what does that look like 100 years from now? If we use it for all of our physical things, if we start using AI from a motor skill perspective, what does that look like 100 years from now? Could it actually be a WALL-E scenario? In WALL-E, granted they had to go into space, but actual bone density was decreased. So there's a lot to unpack with going entirely into just embracing AI.

Matthew Connor: I can't help but think that it is going to come down to more the social status portion of it. Let me clarify. We see this all the time with what is in vogue and what isn't. When something is hard to achieve, it becomes more of a status symbol and people aspire to it. You see this with weight loss, you see it with people's physiques. Even on the physical side, going that route, it becomes one of these things that, if it's obtainable... I think we're starting to see that with the help of weight loss drugs. Unfortunately, for the longest time, at least especially in the United States, we've had a food industry that has made it really challenging, made the food incredibly addictive, kind of overstimulates the brain and makes it to where people are overeating. It's highly packed in calories, and it's a real challenge. But now we're starting to see a massive shift thanks to a lot of weight loss drugs, these GLP-1 ones. And I think we're going to see this rise of "Oh, that's cool," where it becomes this thing that people aspire to. It's much healthier. Everybody wants to live longer. So when it's attainable, when it's not out of reach. I think the problem before the GLP-1s was that it was out of reach, physically and mentally, for most people to have a healthy body, because the forces were against them. There were some people who are naturally leaner and it was easier for them. But for most people, and if you look at the US population, we've gotten very, very heavy, and now we are getting much, much leaner thanks to these. So I think there's this social and psychological aspect where people are going to start to appreciate these things.

I'm getting back to AI here, I promise. Once you look at the psychological impact of what is prestigious, people won't aspire to just be completely lazy and sitting around. Right now we put retirement and your days off on this pedestal, because people are working so hard that that becomes the reward. But when you don't have to work hard anymore, I think it's natural to think that we'll just get fat and lazy, and some people will obviously, but I think what society will start valuing is how you spend your free time. The Romans had this thing. They had enslaved so many people in Rome that the people did not have to work. They had slaves for everything. Everybody in Rome had slaves except for the slaves, right? So what was crazy was they had this thing of how you spend your free time. That was where you got your social status. Were you studying the arts and history, and were you creating stuff? What were you doing with your time?

I think that is a glimpse of where we will be with AI. We will be at a much higher level. But when everything is provided for us, it will be a "What are you doing with your life?" Everybody will feel this pressure of "Oh yeah, I have not had the time to do stuff." So what I'm really interested in is, let's say, painting. I think we'll see a resurgence of the arts and the humanities, and we'll see people really valuing artists and the creators. It will be what you do with your free time. It won't be "I just screw around and I drink beer and I sit around and watch baseball." That's not going to be cool. I think where we go as a society is we will start valuing the "Oh, you created that. Wow, that's amazing. You're on a chair that was actually made by hand. Oh, you made that." Versus, because we see it now, the cheap Chinese stuff that just comes out that's mass-produced. I think people will see that for everything: "Oh, that was just AI produced." Great, we'll have these great products, trucks, but they'll be AI produced, and it won't be the same as sitting in a chair that was handmade by somebody, or that vase that somebody made. I think we'll see that.

I don't think we go to WALL-E. I love WALL-E, but I don't think we go that route, because WALL-E is a reflection of where we are as tired humans. We won't be tired, because AI is taking up the mantle of the physical work and all the mental work. So now it becomes what do you do with your life? I think people want to have fulfillment, they want to have a purpose, and a lot of people put that on work right now, like I am. They get their fulfillment from work because that's all they have time and energy for. And the young kids are coming up and saying, "That's really stupid. What are you doing?"

Roberta Anderson: I think you do have a point there. This next generation is definitely looking more for fulfillment. It's an interesting thought. I don't know, right? It'll be interesting to see where we go. This is definitely a new era that we're in, to say the least. But I think you do bring up some really good points about the next generation, 1000%, kind of looking at their parents and saying, "You guys slaved away. I don't want to do that." And AI is definitely opening the opportunity for them to not have to. I hope so. I hope my daughter doesn't have to work as hard as I did, and as my dad did. I definitely hope they have the opportunity to do more of the passion stuff. And it's sad too, to see, like, my father-in-law is a huge woodworker and made furniture and stuff like that, and you just don't see that so much anymore. The people who built stuff with their hands. It would be so great to see that come back, the artistry, the homemade things. So it would be nice. But a lot of it is that people don't do a lot in their free time because they're exhausted, and there's just not so much free time with people working definitely more than 40 hours a week. So it would be very lovely to see if that's where it happens. I don't know that that would happen right away. I think it's probably going to be more of a WALL-E first and then turn to something better, but it'll be interesting to see.

Matthew Connor: I just don't think it ends up like WALL-E, because we're already seeing it with the kids. The reason I think we have a hard time seeing it is because we come from a generation and a time where there was no Internet, there were no cell phones. We lived in a kind of analog world growing up, and being able to see this transition, we had to work through it. And the kids now coming up, let's be real about this, we live like kings and better than kings and queens of any time in the past. We push a button and stuff shows up. Amazing stuff that couldn't be produced 200 years ago or 100 years ago, or in many cases 50 or 10 years ago. We live in these very comfortable environments where we have access to more information than anybody in the history of time has had access to. So all information, all products and services, everything is so comfortable that now there is so much wealth and prosperity. I know there are lots of places in the world where it's not. But if you look in aggregate at the entire world, it's collectively much wealthier than it was 50 years ago. It is going to be exponentially wealthier when so much more is produced by [unclear].

So the kids now have the benefit of living in a world where I live like a king and queen without having to kill myself. We had to kill ourselves to get to where we are. And we're like, "Dude, you've got to be willing to work your butt off to get where you want to go. What are you doing? Don't slack off. Your 20s and 30s are for busting your butt so that hopefully in your 40s you're at a good enough level to where you're making some good money, and then in your 50s you're good, and then when you go to retire, you've got some money put away." That's the world we grew up in. They grew up in a world where they push a button and stuff shows up, and it's almost godlike powers, except it doesn't manifest immediately, but it's pretty quick. In 15 minutes your food's delivered. It's pretty impressive, right? So it makes sense that they are taking advantage of that and saying, "If I don't work at all, can I still live like royalty? If I work very little..." It's not like it used to be, where if we didn't work hard, you were afraid of being the person in a cardboard box. That's not the case for them. Of course, it's not for everybody. There's not a social safety net for everybody yet, because there's not that kind of wealth before the kids coming up and people in the productive, prosperous band of society. That's the reality. So I think that's why we won't see the WALL-E version. We see it in the Gen Z years. Most of those kids don't want to sit around and get fat. They want to do something more fulfilling with their life, and they would enjoy life, not suck down Doritos and Mountain Dew through a straw. I don't think that's where they go.

Roberta Anderson: I think we're seeing glimpses of it in the Gen Z years, but to that point, I think it's a perspective thing, because our generation views them as lazy. Our perspective of working hard is not their perspective of working hard. Where does that lead? Because if they're looking for fulfillment, that could be stuff that isn't... I don't want to talk down about anyone's fulfillment, but what if that isn't enough to pay bills? We are concerned about this for our daughter. That's great, so that's fulfilling. But is that going to pay your rent and pay for your food if literally every single one of them is doing that? It doesn't matter if AI is making things easy if they're still not gravitating towards things that even use AI. If they all want to raise puppies because that's fulfilling, what does that do overall for the economy? What does that do overall for them? If they're saying, "Well, I don't even need to do anything with AI, because I'm going to be a puppy handler or I'm going to plant flowers," how is that benefiting them or even the economy?

Matthew Connor: I think there's going to be a real challenging transition period between our current economy and state of work, how we function now, and that future economy where it is all done by AI, where robots do all the creation, everything is run by AI, where literally every product, every service, you've got a robot in your house that does all the cooking, the cleaning, the protection. I think that will be a fundamental shift. And when you see robots in homes, what's going to happen with domestic violence? Good luck beating up RoboCop. There's not going to be that. So it's going to have this profound change on everything.

I think it will be an interesting transition, because currently all that wealth is going to go to the top 5 or 10 manufacturers of those things. Great. And it will have to be a distribution of that wealth back to the people, because there won't be jobs. In that WALL-E future that we're talking about, there won't be jobs, because everything will be manufactured and done. The economy has to shift completely with the perspective of that. We're no longer run by money. It's AI that's doing it, so I don't have to pay a person to come in and do this, which is what makes the economy go. But then we build enough to where the robots build the other robots to build the products and provide the services, and that money aspect goes away. Then it becomes this weird thing of how we wrap our brains around a future that is Star Trek-like, where you push a button and stuff happens and the materials in the world are moved to you, all automated, and you no longer have to spend your time and effort to make that happen. It's happening for everybody. The transition from "I have to work to get what I need" to "it is all provided to everybody" because of the AI labor that is produced. That is a tough one that we don't have a clear path to. But in that Star Trek future, clearly that's where things go, and the economics don't make sense to go and work, because you can't perform as well as the robots in anything in that future where they're amazingly efficient and producing. It doesn't make sense to get involved in that.

So I don't know how we get that transition. I don't think anybody has got that worked out. But that's the future that maybe is 10 or 20 years away, maybe it's 50, maybe we never get to that level. I don't know. If AI never reaches that level of superintelligence and we stay at where we are or slightly better, we would still get to that level of AI doing all this stuff, and it'll be a longer ramp-up to get to that. Economically it would be an easier transition than if next year we have superintelligence, and it's like, "Oh, wow." It's a real issue, because it changes everything so fundamentally so quickly that we would have to ask the superintelligence, "How do we transition?" and listen to it: "This is how you do it." And there'd be no two ways around it. I go on and on, but I think that's the future and how we get there.

Roberta Anderson: Who's governing all of this? Exactly, because all of this is moving so fast and we have no true or good governance around any of this. These are all very large leaps, and there's no governance around this. And are we talking about federal governance, state governance? Because we can't even decide, back to fundamentals, on regulation. We still have different state regulations, so how does the regulation look for this? It's going to be wild.

Matthew Connor: Roberta, I think we could do this all day. Unfortunately, we didn't get to talk about your book, and I would love to have you back on to do an episode on it, because I think it is so good. This has been an absolute blast. But before we go, can you tell everybody where they can find out more about you and more about Onterris?

Roberta Anderson: Yes, absolutely. You can find out more about me via LinkedIn. Please, absolutely reach out to me. I love helping mentor people and talking to people. I read every single message I get. So I'm on LinkedIn, and as we've alluded to, I have a couple of books out. I have a guide for beginners in the digital age [title unclear], and then I have Breaking the Firewall: How Women in Cybersecurity Move from Entry Level to the C-Suite. Both of them are available on Amazon. And if you are interested in anything about Onterris, you can find us on Google, or at onterris.com.

Matthew Connor: Awesome, Roberta. Thanks again, and until next time.

Roberta Anderson: Thank you so much.