TechRadarPro: Estonia – small nation, big tech

Virág talks about wide adoption of technologies and digital government services in Estonia and how from a technological perspective having a smaller number of people, has contributed to Estonia being able to gain more experience and experiment more with innovation in a safe and secure way.

TechRadarPro outlines how because of the widespread and ubiquitous use of digital services in Estonia, most people appear to be savvy enough to avoid falling victim to scams and cyberattacks: “In this sense, because they are exposed to it, they have to use it, they have to learn more about it,” commented Virág.

“Obviously using digital technologies means that people will run into phishing, run into scam, run into situations, and if somebody’s Smart ID access is stolen, or the PIN codes are compromised and eventually that ID can be stolen and impersonated, and I know about cases when this happened.”

“It’s not just necessarily cybercrime in that sense to click on the phishing link or have a ransomware attack, but also impersonation and similar scams are actually going on, so people have to be aware. And they are doing a good job, so if you look at the news, there are no big news [stories] coming from Estonia that this cyberattack took down that school or banking clients were scammed or robbed,” said Virág to TechRadarPro.

AI boom

The recent AI boom has permeated nearly every industry around the world, and Estonia is no exception. Virág, however expresses to TechRadarPro his personal opinion and being skeptical of the current crop of AI tools, and thinks that it may take a while for the technology’s true potential to be realized: “Personally, I believe that the majority of the openly available solutions that you’re using are actually not AI; they are very good machine-learning algorithms.”

Virág says when it comes to generative AI, he uses ChatGPT or other solutions. “But obviously, it’s like with Wikipedia: you cannot fully trust the content you see there because anybody can add it, you don’t know how the learning was done… if you don’t know the domain, I would not perform – I don’t know – brain surgery based on what ChatGPT recommends to do.”

“So… I’m still expecting to see the true intelligence. And by intelligence, I mean that kind of capability that is not just generative –  in the sense that it reads something and then based on what it has read, it gives you an answer… that it believes is most suitable for your question – but eventually coming to a new realization.”

Read more from the original TechRadarPro article.