AI Robots & Cyberattacks: Is Technology Moving Too Fast? (S5) S37

"Just because we can doesn't mean we should." That refrain echoes through John C. Morley's monologue in this episode of The JMOR Tech Talk Show, where he walks through 14 stories designed to test whether security, privacy, responsibility, and infrastructure are keeping pace with what technology can already do. The throughline is not that technology is moving too fast in the abstract, but that the human systems around it—accountability, patching, transparency, community planning—are lagging dangerously behind.

The Patch That Saved NASA—And the Lesson Most Ignore

Morley opens with a deceptively simple story: NASA was reportedly hacked. But the attack failed because the affected software had already been patched. His point is not the headline but the unglamorous work behind it. "Patching isn't exciting. Updates aren't glamorous. Preventative maintenance doesn't make headlines, but the security work you perform today could be exactly what stops an attack tomorrow." He contrasts this with real-world behavior: he never downloads the latest Apple update immediately, waiting a few days for the inevitable revision. The bigger problem, he argues, is that even when organizations are alerted to vulnerabilities, they often ignore them. "A vulnerability is one thing, but if you know about it, and either you're gonna auto-patch it or you're gonna schedule the deployments, are you gonn