Artificial Intelligence agents are transforming how enterprises operate, but they're also introducing unprecedented security challenges. These autonomous systems can perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions—capabilities that make them incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous.

As organizations rush to adopt agentic AI systems, with industry predictions of 25% of companies launching pilots by 2025, understanding the security implications becomes critical. This four-part series examines agentic AI from a security professional's perspective, exploring both the opportunities and the risks these systems present.

Talofa reader,

It’s February already, but happy 2025, and gong xi fa chai 🐍 all the same!

This isn’t an actual post, but more of a “hey, checking in and letting you know I’ve got somerantswriting coming!”

This is already shaping up to be a weird year, what with everything going on in AI, U.S. Politics, our shitty politics and just the overall decline of human society (😂😭).

Talofa reader,

Looking back on this year, or any year for that matter, but more intensely in recent years, you see the course of the year, the events that happened, the things you went through at work, at home, in the gym and with your social circles, the heaters and rain in winter, the fans and singlets out in Summer.

The ups, the downs, normal life shit.

But as the years stack up, the ups and downs aren't jagged spikes anymore, they've started to flow out as "arcs" of your years, and across those arcs, where jobs started and relationships ended, life events changed the course of your world, these became the seasons of your mortality.

I'm free-styling this piece because I had an observation about my life, sitting here at my desk, working from home on a weekday morning.

I say observation, because it's not a realisation — it's not an epiphany I had at my desk, and now suddenly I see the world differently.

I've known these things for a while, because I like to think a lot, and my realisations about how this life ebbs and flows came and went, in my late teens, my late 20s, and through to turning 40.

I'm at a stage in life where I can see the seasons of life happening, sometimes they span years, other times, months.

Nothing lasts forever, and everything must have an end.

Talofa reader,

The "digital divide" is a term I've been hearing since I first got into community work with my charity back in 2017. Back then, researchers from the '90s had this simple way of looking at it - you either had computers and internet, or you didn't. Pretty straightforward stuff: get people devices, hook them up to the internet, problem solved. The lack of Pasifika representation in IT was wrapped up in this whole narrative.

But here's the thing - the research has come a long way since then. JAN A. G. M. Van Dijk's 2020 book "The Digital Divide" shows it's way more complex than just having a device and internet connection. Just because you've got the hardware doesn't mean you're actually participating in the digital economy in any meaningful way.

I didn’t really buy the whole "just get them devices" thinking. I knew it was an important step, for sure, but in my experience that device never made the techie.

So, after working in this space for a few years, something started nagging at me.

The real challenge facing Pasifika wasn't what everyone thought it was. And I knew this because it was exactly what had helped me succeed in tech myself.

But something wasn't adding up.

Talofa reader,

Up until my final year, I was on my way to joining the airforce after high school when one thing happened that changed it all in one night.

My Croatian friend and I were chatting on ICQ when he asked me if I wanted "to see something cool?"

Yes. Of course I did.

Then he "hacked" my Dad's computer that I was using.

I had one of those movie-moment revelations - you know the ones where the protagonist's eyes are suddenly opened to the real world and they transcend their mere mortal experience into god-mode. Maybe not quite that dramatic, but this was the beginning of an unstoppable journey into a world that would completely revolutionise how I saw and understood everything.

I discovered the world of the hacker.

At the time, I saw these uniquely smart, unapologetically irreverent, super creative and stubbornly anti-establishment minds who stood for more than just breaking into computers.

In my eyes, they represented freedom of information, freedom of expression, and true intellectual meritocracy - it didn't matter your age, gender, race, or background. If you loved computers, loved learning, and believed in a free and fair society, you were in.

These were the people willing to risk it all to give big corps and suits the middle finger.

And I was here for all of it.

Now it's 2024. The world is full of more injustice than ever, all the things hackers stood against are thriving, but that hacker world I came to idolise?

I can't find it anywhere.

What happened?

Talofa reader,

Get ready for a long rant, with a lot of swear words.

I started writing this piece after reading about the Israeliterrorist attackon Lebanon on Tuesday 17th September, that exploded hundreds of pagers across Lebanon and Syria, killing 12 and woundingthousands.

It had been 12 months already of the genocide of the Palestinian people by US-backed Israel, and now a blatant terrorist attack in two more Arab countries, and all I’m seeing is the sustained and morally bankrupt western media, continue it’s agenda of lies and propaganda, straight down the camera, for the world to see.

To watch the western world - politicians, media, pundits, public figures etc. - with a straight face, talk the most absolute bollocks I've ever heard in my entire life, has been quite a thing.

Watching Matt Miller, U.S. spokesperson, repeatedly claim that theU.S. had not found any evidence of Israel violating International Humanitarian Law, even after all videos we’ve seen, and evidence and testimony has stacked up on news sites, has been sickening.

Talofa reader,

I saw a post by a Māori Entrepreneur & Investor who had recently launched an AI company, which left me flabbergasted.

In the post, he advises his followers to watch a documentary on Netflix, where the first episode discusses AI. He then remarks on the things he learned from this documentary, on Netflix, in September 2024.

This individual was surprised to learn about the extensive data requirements of large language models like ChatGPT. He only just discovered that these AI systems are trained on massive amounts of internet data, encompassing a wide variety of content. This includes not only openly available information but also potentially copyrighted material, and it's not clear how much of each was used.

The person emphasised that the training data for these models isn't limited to formal publications or books. Training datasets also absorbed personal content such as blog posts and social media interactions. As a result, these AI systems are exposed to a broad spectrum of human expression, which most likely included indigenous knowledge.

He's only just learned this, two weeks after launching his AI company that weaves AI with Indigenous knowledge.

I had to sit there, staring at the screen doing the "beautiful mind" meme, trying to make sense of the world.

How?

Talofa reader,

I had some thoughts recently on this topic, and after a live stream and discord discussion, wanted to note things down.

Talofa reader,

A few weeks ago, I made the relatively easy decision to wind down The Pasifika Tech Network.

"Failed project" may be a harsh way to put it, but I think there's value in calling something what it is, so you can better understand how not to do it again in future.

This is a project that failed.

Ok, but what did it fail to do? And why?

To understand that, we have to go back to the beginning and look at why it was created in the first place; what its intended goal was; and the reasons it wasn't able to live up to this.

I just wanted to send you a note to say, thank you, for valuing access to my writing enough to part with your hard-earned money…

And to let you know there’s more writing in the pipeline, it’s just been competing with several other things that require brain-space, which, as smart as I think I am, is still limited lol.

If there’s a particular topic you’d be interested in hearing me speak on, or explore, please feel free to contact me, I’m open to ideas.

Also, I’m gonna try the podcast thing soon- which will just be me reading the post out, so you can hear it how I mean it to sound :)

til the next one,

Ron.