Name: From Mines to Machines, the Business Risks of Embodied AI
Uploaded: 2026-05-07T15:30:53.677Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 32 s
Description: From Mines to Machines, the Business Risks of Embodied AI

Transcript for "From Mines to Machines, the Business Risks of Embodied AI": Hi, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Kathleen Kuzma, technical marketing manager here at Recorded Future. Before moving, though, into technical marketing and sales engineering, I first started off my career in the US government as an intelligence analyst, which is why topics like what you're going to hear about today are super fascinating to me. So today, we're joined by Joe Rook from our threat research team, the InSight Group. InSight is short is the translation for insight in Swedish, which is Recorded Future's in house research division. This team is made up of former intelligence analysts who are tracking nation state threats, geopolitical events, and security researchers who produce the original intelligence that answers a lot of key questions from our customer and also powers the Recorded Future platform. Today's session is titled Minds, Minds, and Machines, and Joe is gonna walk us through findings tied to the latest executive insights report, Hacking Embodied AI, which was published just a few days ago. If you haven't had a chance yet to read that report, I've linked that in the documents tab on the right hand side of your screen. And throughout the session, I'll just jump back in to quickly walk through use cases in the record feature platform that align with that presentation from showing timeline views on how mining contracts can overlap with malicious traffic targeting to how we can track vulnerabilities tied to these key robotic technologies. Few quick heist housekeeping items before I officially hand it over to Joe. Today's recording is being this session is being recorded as always, and it will be available to registrants after the conclusion of the webinar. Please use the q and a option on the right hand side of your screen to ask questions throughout. We will have a dedicated q and a time at the end of the presentation, and I'm sure we'll have a really interesting discussion based on everything that Joe is gonna walk through today. And with that, I'll hand it back over to you, Joe, to walk us through everything that you've been working on. Thank you, Kathleen. And it's always great to do these with, these sessions with you because I often get asked, especially after I've done this talk, with customers, is, okay. How can I use the product to to kinda help me find similar patterns and similar trends? And so Kathleen's gonna kindly, interject throughout, and I'll be inviting Kathleen to show you as I bring up some of the findings on the screen. So, this is one of my favorite talks to do. I've been had the privilege of doing this quite a few times at various events. And every time, it's it it changes. There's some new information or there's some new insights that we're able to bring. And as Kathleen's already said, some of this research is tagged there for you to read in your own time. So, again, the title, mines, mines, and machines. And, no, I'm not talking about mines. Is it land mines or or sea mines? I mean, mining operations and how that intersects and feeds into the broader industrial revolution that is currently underway. So let's get into it. And, before I go any further, it's really important to start with where do we find ourselves today? What is the geopolitical landscape that this industrial revolution is operating in? And it's super important because it is gonna allow us to look ahead and prepare for this power competition around the technologies that we're beginning to now see emerge and enter into our everyday lives, economies, societies, militaries. So I'm gonna say this quite upfront, and, hopefully, by now, people will begin to agree, is the world order that we knew or as we knew it has ended. And I used to say it's ending when I started to do this talk sort of towards the end of 2025. But since the start of 2026, I think it's very, very safe to say it has ended. And so the rules based international order based on liberal principles where every country would want to become a democracy, and that was the the mantra for a while because it was so great, to be a democracy. Unfortunately, for those of us living in democracies, it's probably now no longer the case, in terms of the appeal. And, actually, you're seeing hard power over soft power become projected in some some very high, you know, highly highly reported events. And you can argue this dates back to sort of 2014 where this is challenged with the invasion of of Crimea and the Donbas region, Ukraine by Russian forces. But, of course, 2022 marks a real turning point whereby that liberal world based order is challenged. And then, of course, The US releases its national security strategy towards the end of 2025. And, of course, again, I don't think I need to tell this audience what happens from then on when it comes to the capturing of Maduro and recent, strikes in Iran. So very high level, but, of course, we can all begin to see those patterns changing and really just have to turn on the news to start to really observe this. So the world order as we knew it, this thirty years of exceptional peace and stability where one power, The United States, dominated everything from the military to, sort of global military affairs to economics to policy has now become, increasingly challenged. Of course, it's still an extremely powerful nation, but it is coming under more pressure. And we're moving back into this era of what used to exist before the cold war of possibly a bipolar world order or a multipolar world order. And a multipole polar multipolar world order has has always gonna be the norm. We have lots of powers competing, and, that is a very dangerous world to live in. So one thing for me, that that I I really honed in on was Insit Group's, research. It's great bit of research. There's lots of great research done by the team in the platform, and it shows, you know, talking about the wider strategic picture and what's happening geopolitically. And this V Day parade, the Victory Day parade held in Beijing this year was particularly noticeable, not just because of some of the military technology and robotics and automation, automotive I'm sorry, autonomous systems that are on display, but also who was there. And if you look at that map, you can really start to see it carving out its sphere of influence around it and in making sure that key delegations are there. And what's also noticeable is who isn't there, and that's also a clear indication of how things might become a little bit more bumpy when it comes to international relations and geopolitics in the coming years. So really interesting to see who was there. And we did a really good piece of research on that, which I highly recommend you look at if you've not already and you have access. In our state of security report, which again is public, we argued that spheres of influence are emerging. And we're not we're not coining this phrase. I mean, this is a phrase that's been openly thrown around by lots of, lots of, competing powers. The Western Hemisphere, again, in the national doctrine, security doctrine of The United States, that is saying, this is our hemisphere. We are going to reestablish dominance, and some of the activities you've observed very much speak to that. The Eurasian Hemisphere, again, Russia making it no secret. It wishes to reestablish its influence in its previous Soviet slash empire, which, again, involves Eastern Europe and parts of Central Asia and beyond. And then, finally, the Indo Pacific Hemisphere, the the the historic Chinese Middle Kingdom, and I always go back to this phrase, the Middle Kingdom. If you're not familiar with the Middle Kingdom, really encourage you to read Chinese history and understand how powerful they were in the region for hundreds, if not thousands, of years until the first industrial revolution and the opium wars changed it for them in around eighteen fifties, eighteen forties. And and, if you're not familiar with the opium wars, please read them. Please read about them, because it really sets a precedent for what comes next and how China is thinking today. So I really encourage people to look at that. This isn't a history lesson, so I won't dwell on it further. But these fears of influence are emerging, and you can also see on here the Arctic and Antarctica being pointed to because we cannot ignore new new areas, new battlegrounds potentially where there are lots of minerals and resources being focused on. And, again, you're starting to see headlines, sort of popping up around this polar war concept. But, again, you know, going back to what I was saying around other areas, so imperial ambitions, like I just said there, this deep rooted sense of historical ownership of a region by China in the Indo Pacific area. And then I always find it fascinating to pay attention to forecasting markets like polymark. I don't endorse any any gambling or orbit, but it does give you a really good indication as to what people are thinking and what may manifest. And so, again, the fact you've got people betting on whether or not The US would invade Cuba and that going up, you know, just some of the signals that that should be paid attention to. And then, of course, you wanna map that to what's actually happening, troop movements, policy announcements, etcetera. Okay. Let's talk because we have a lot to get through here. This is a this is a big topic. So I'm gonna jump into the economies and then how things are beginning to change. And what you're looking at here are some predictions, some of them materialize, may not, of where economies may end up, overall GDP, by 2036, which is not that far away. That is ten years away, and it will come very quickly. And those bubbles that are changing just shows you some of this massive transformation that's occurred even in ten, fifteen years. India stands out as a, you know, a country with an enormous population, enormous ambitions as well, reasserting itself as one of the behemoth economies that it, by the way, used to be before the first industrial revolution. And this is what people forget. The same goes to China. India and China historically were always the biggest economies for a lot of reasons. The Silk Road ran all the way to those countries for a reason. Countries tried to invade them for a reason because of their wealth and because of their technology and because of their influence, but they were always able to hang on to that position right up until the first industrial revolution. And so they are now seeing this as an opportunity to reclaim. I'm speaking very high level, but they're and and simplistically in many ways, but reclaiming their rightful positions as economic behemoths. So really interesting to see this transformation. There's other countries there that we should be paying attention to. And I like this image of this skyline because, again, if I was in a room with everyone, I'd be saying, do you know where this is? But this is Shanghai, and you can start to see how the landscape, the just the pure economic growth in China is really just reflective now in images and how this is really transforming everything from society to the military, which we'll talk about shortly. One thing I will note, I do appreciate there'll be some people listening to this. Yeah. But China has a lot of problems. It has a lot of issues, particularly with some of the real estate debt that's building, etcetera. You're right. When there's another big problem that China faces, which is gonna tie neatly into the rest of this talk. In our state of security report, we also announced that well, we analyzed potential conflict hot spots. And, unfortunately, some of these have materialized, some of them more reported on than others. And, again, there are possibly more here that we we haven't captured that may erupt. But just from what we were seeing towards the end of 2025, so 2026, this was our assessment. And so the message here is as we enter this multipolar slash bipolar slash we're not sure what yet world order, we can expect conflict hotspots to continue to emerge. Like I said just before, there are some real challenges facing the world and, in particular, some countries. And one of them is the fact that populations are, statistically, if you look at the data, beginning to collapse. And whilst people think, well, you know, populations globally is gonna keep going up. It's gonna keep going up. Look at Africa. Well, yes. But look at even this chart where Africa's population or fertility rate and birth rate is beginning to decline. So this is important to understand because our economies, our militaries, our societies are built on the assumption that populations will just continue to grow. Therefore, there'll be more young people to pay tax, etcetera, etcetera, more people to consume. And, unfortunately, particularly for some of the, Western and and and Asian governments, the penny is starting to drop, whereby that is no longer the case, and they're going to have to think outside the box. And it's going to soon, I promise, start to make sense with what we're gonna do with technology. So what what this is showing, I'll keep this brief, is fertility rates are simply put like this. Every woman has to have 2.1 children or two children if you're going to do it the most that way for a population to just remain stable, not to grow, not to drop, just remain stable. And what you're starting to see in the developed world is or it's been been going on for a while, really, certainly since around the nineteen eighties in Europe and North America and East Asia, is that going below replacement level? And it is causing a lot of concern because when you translate that into what that means for populations, all of a sudden, there are very sharp drops. And a good case study to look at right now is Japan and South Korea. South Korea's fertility rate, from the top of my head is about naught point seven three, naught point seven five. It's very low. What that means is is a population now of 55,000,000 in about sixty years could, if they're lucky, be around 15,000,000. That is a serious collapse in population. And look at these data points coming out from places like China where and I think this is possibly generous. Is it saying, well, it's going to peak at about 2030 already it's already gonna peak now and then very quickly plummet by 2100 to half its population. So 1,400,000,000 to about 640,000,000. And the trend is not just exclusive to them. Some countries are going up, and, of course, we can talk about Nigeria and Pakistan. But given what's going on and given the trajectory, also at some point, their populations will start to drop. And the baselines just keep getting worse. Every time I read an article about this where you've had the UN, where you've had the or someone else go in and do the data, the population projections get worse year on year. And if you don't believe me, here are some headlines which you're going to start to notice more and more. Scores closing in Greece, military sizes shrinking, and this one just came out the other week in the BBC. More UK deaths than births expected every year from now on. So despite migration in the Western world being brought in to try and amplify and try and deal with that slow population burn and collapse, it is not enough, and populations everywhere are falling. Let's talk about the first industrial revolution where energy was really at the core of a lot of the changes, but also another trend, which was population. But this time, it swelled. And this is a very simplistic timeline I want to walk you through. So Britain's population started to swell, and they needed wood to keep warm, but they kept we kept we kept running out of forests. So we kept coming from we can't do this anymore. So what we realized is we have a lot of coal in The UK, and, actually, it's really good at keeping people warm. And we got more people being born, so we need to keep more people warm. And many of the mines where this coal was were quite waterlogged, so we went, we need to get rid of the water. So we started to use steam powered pistons, which was quite a new technology, to start pumping water out of these mine shafts. And so the first machines were very, very inefficient. They needed lots of coal, but luckily, we had lots of coal to fuel it. Entrepreneurs then started improving those machines and going, yeah. We can make them better. And then entrepreneurs started connecting those machines that were initially used to take water out of the mine shafts to looms and gins in the textile industry, which started to revolutionize textile production. Right? So you started to get a lot more textiles being produced into pretty high quality. So we start mass producing and mass exporting. It makes The UK very rich. And then, among other things, we go, what if we put that steam engine onto a train that's transporting the coal out of the mine? And it worked. And then in 1830, the first commercial railway line opens between Manchester and Liverpool, and the economy is turbocharged so that The United Kingdom leads the first industrial revolution and many other areas for at least a century and a half. So that's a simplistic timeline, but you can start to see some parallels in maybe what's happening today. So the race is on, and the Chinese have spent a lot of time studying how technical technological leaps occur, and they've come to the conclusion that it happens very suddenly. And I know some of you are probably thinking about AI. Yes. Absolutely. They're thinking about this too. And whoever integrates that technology, AI, into their economy first wins. And you look at the sort of timeline here. So people would say, right, the first industrial revolution led and won by the British is focused on the things we've just discussed. The second industrial revolution led and won by the Americans. The third, again by the Americans. And now we're entering or have entered the fourth industrial revolution, which is what many people would argue, including myself, which is gonna be all about things like space, advanced manufacturing, automation, which is when we start talking about AI and robotics, sustainable energy systems, quantum computing. The list could go on a little bit. Trying to keep it simple for the sake of today's talk and the fact that I I've only got about another forty minutes or so with you. But the point is is that we are now heading full steam, excuse the pun, into this fourth industrial revolution, but there are two things powering it. You cannot win this or you cannot develop your fourth industrial revolution strategy without semiconductors or minerals. And I would argue, even more importantly, it's the minerals. If you haven't got minerals, you can't even make the semiconductors. Again, I'm simplifying it, but it's super important to understand that. So that's why we need to talk about mines. Now rare earth elements and critical elements, I'm sure you're probably hearing more and more about these in the news, are what power a huge amount of what we use today, technology we use today. This laptop that I'm talking through to you through right now, my phone that I use to, to make calls, and to send messages, etcetera, is only possible because of the critical elements and rare earth elements that you see on this periodic table. And the process of extracting those rare earth elements and the key parts of those rare earth elements is really strenuous. It's energy intensive. It's dirty work. There's lots of parts to it. So you get the mineral oil. You then gotta crush it and grind it. You gotta chemically separate it, purify it, and then and then you can then inject that or put that into your finished product. And when you start to look at who's dominated this and who strategically positioned themselves in a way that they can control the rare earth elements, mining and refining, it is China once again. It is a genius move that has been thought through very carefully because they don't have to think too much about environmental regulations or all the the disgusting stuff that comes off of these things and goes into the area, or they don't have money. They can they can use their they've got the energy because they're building and building and building coal, plants and everything else. You know, whilst everyone's decarbonizing, China has absolutely rocketed its carbon footprint, and it has allowed it to be the dominant player here. And so it's no surprise that you see headlines like this. Some European carmakers suspend production amid rare earth shortages. The fact that it can bring The United States to a table in London in some the summer of last year to sit it down and say, you will give us what we asked for, or you're not getting these minerals, it is massively important for China, and they have done a fantastic job at positioning themselves that strategically. And in fact, this Forbes article, it is actually more than 85% now. I believe it's something like 90% of rare earth elements are processed, and it they are producing, I believe, now more than 60%. There's another area we should talk about, which is deep sea mining, and the seabed is increasingly going to become a battlefield. In fact, it already has begun. Why? Well, a lot of those minerals I've just discussed, yes, they're on the surface of the Earth, and you have to get a, you know, a tractor or whatever, digger and go mine it, high-tech equipment like that. But, actually, under the sea, you have a lot more of these minerals there. So on the crusts coming out of the vents, you have potato sized polymetallic nodules that are just completely packed with these elements and critical minerals that we we require. And there's a lot of them particularly in the Pacific Ocean, and that is something that I just want you to just really digest for a minute because there are two major powers building that will have very powerful navies, and the Pacific Ocean is absolutely littered with a lot of these minerals and these resources. So keep an eye on that. Now the obvious one everyone's been talking about is the North Pole and, and and, of course, Greenland. Now now, okay, there's lots of reasons and we're not gonna get all political here. There's lots of reasons why Greenland is of interest to The United States. But but one thing that is undeniable is the fact that Greenland does have a lot of the critical minerals and rare earth elements that The United States would love to be able to extract or use or purchase and not have the Chinese have this in their arsenal. They do not want to be reliant on the Chinese. So Greenland, a very harsh environment, not much infrastructure there. Europe and and, you know, Denmark and Greenland have not invested in building the infrastructure or the mining facilities there for a lot of reasons. Not saying it's good or bad, but they just haven't. And The United States is saying, we need these now. So we may actually do this. So please keep an eye on this. This this this chapter is not over. And then when you look at the bigger picture in the Arctic, and, of course, you can see Greenland there where it's again saying you do have cobalt, copper, graphite, etcetera, across the whole North Pole, all these countries and probably within the region itself, you know, we're not even talking about the what's under the sea yet fully. There are a lot of a lot of minerals and resources. So it's no surprise the Russians are militarizing this area like mad. And now you'll see other countries, these Arctic powers, also begin to think about how they protect their minerals and resources in the region. And I haven't even got on to the shipping lanes. That's another whole conversation. The South Pole is something we should also bear in mind as being a strategic point of focus and and the Antarctic region, and you can start to see here just how many countries already in the South Pole and Antarctica have got bases and positions. And so we do need to be thinking carefully about how this region in the future could become a battleground. So there's no surprise then you start to see headlines like this popping up saying that growing Chinese and Russian activity urgently needs a US response. There are ships, there are vessels, there are expeditions looking for where to be able to extract resources. And I'll pass over to, Kathleen in a second, but what we gotta remember is is that cyberattacks are not random when it comes to these mineral and mining operations. And Indonesia has lots of nickel, and it's vital for the Chinese and others to understand who is having deals with them, who's opening up mines. And so it's no surprise that you start to see this overlap of activity, and this is from the platform again showing you where there have been big deals signed and where group has observed, high value targeting of certain organizations that probably are linked to the decision making process. So on that note, I'm gonna hand over to, Kathleen. Thanks so much, Joe. So as Joe already showed that timeline view, so it would be worthwhile to showcase that same timeline view but live within the recorded feature platform. Because as Joe's already laid out in his first part of the presentation, the geopolitical spheres of influence and economic drivers also that are going to overlap with the cyber activity that we're seeing. And this timeline is a really great example of that where we're seeing when there's been certain investment deals made, with them when we're seeing spikes in associated China nation state activity. And this is the type of visualization and advanced query that the Recorded Future platform gives analysts the power to do. Now this is already created for me, so I easily can just save this. But if I wanted to edit this or really go even more into, let's say, other areas, that's where in the involving field, in this case, we're, again, looking at all China nation state threat actors as well as using the insect group as our source of truth with their research leads. And these research leads are tactical types of reports on what are nation state threat actors, who are they targeting, and what is the infrastructure that they're using to accomplish those goals, and then overlapping it with the more geopolitical types of events, so looking at references to Indonesia and any investment deals involving nickel, where we're using these overall event types that help classify all of the, in this case, open source information we're collecting, but making it relevant so that you all can answer any key questions that are coming from maybe you have some stakeholders who have interest in understanding, like, what cyber activity is happening, targeting some key mining companies. You know, this is the type of query overlapping with insights group research as well as our own malicious network traffic analysis, which we'll talk about a little bit more later, can really help you give a full view on exactly where that geopolitical and economic driving is overlapping with the, cyber piece as well. One quick reference to especially if they have any current recorded feature customers on the call for the hacking and body report that I have posted in the document section for anyone to read, did wanna note that it is available in the Recorded Future platform, which you can easily find in the news and research section, which is going to include the full report, again, also available publicly online as well as some other recommended queries. So you can do very similar types of analysis to what Joe just walked through on that slide and then what we just also shared live as well. And with that, I'll pass back over to Joe to go through, yeah, the rest of his presentation. Thank you, Kathleen. Alright. So we've spoken about minds. Now we need to talk about minds in terms of how this is going to transform and how this is going to power the AI revolution, if you wanna call it that, that has completely swept us all. So why do minerals matter? Well, without minerals, you cannot have semiconductors. And the key one that everyone's talking about, I'm sure, are the GPUs, which used to be great for gaming and, you know, if you wanted to build your own computer, not too expensive. I mean, it was expensive. But now, yeah, you're gonna have to be putting aside a fair bit of money because all the GPUs being used to make, videos of, you know, various various pets doing certain things or or some celebrity doing something that is clearly not what they're what they're actually doing. Point is without the minerals that we've just discussed, without those critical rare earth elements, critical minerals, you cannot make them, or it is very difficult to pay them. And so this whole ecosystem, many names here you probably recognize, rely on that stream reliable stream of critical minerals to come in. Now I'm gonna hand back over quickly to to to Kathleen, in a second. But one thing that we have observed in group is we're not talking about cybersecurity and cyberattacks. There's a massive amount of targeting, some of this is public reporting, of semiconductors and semiconductor supply chain. And so just, again, one thing to be very, very clear, and you can see some targeting here of, of Taiwan, is that a lot of these are supply chain, companies. So low hanging fruit. So through them, you're able to then get access to the organization you are actually trying to target. And so, Kathleen, if you do have anything you wanna show, very happy to hand over. Definitely. Yeah. Especially with tracking semiconductor related threats. This is also where using the research from the insights group and understanding how we're tagging everything to specific technologies can be really important. So this is where I'm going back into our intelligence cards, in this case, looking at all insight group research on semiconductors. So whether we're looking at overall related entities, so what are some of the main, like, TTPs that are being used to target semiconductors, whether it's the products themselves being used? This is where we can use Recorded Future as well to really look at those specific threats. And when we are tracking specific industry threats, this is where whether it's the technologies in question that we're the most interested in tracking to the specific industry, whether it is the semiconductor industry, the records or threat map is also personalized based on tracking for those specific assets. So whether it's those specific technologies that your team is using or, again, interested in researching threat actor activities for, this is also where we can use the threat map to look at some of those very specific types of research entities as well. Super quick call out there on, like, the semiconductor piece, but it's definitely something that's worthwhile to know, especially for any customers on the call, for how to be able to look for some of those threats as well. Thank you. Alright. Let me share and get back into it. So thanks, Kathleen. So, again, just just really important to know that the the actors that are conducting this, there's there's there's plenty of information in the platform that explains what we're seeing, etcetera, around it. So let's go back into what is artificial intelligence then. So we've talked about the semiconductors being important, and, ultimately, it's powering something arguably more important and more, consequential in in in our lives and economies, which is simply put, you can break into a few different areas. I like this diagram because it nicely divides out the three stages that you're hearing a lot about. ANI, artificial neuro intelligence, is probably one of the lesser known, words, but I'm sure everyone here is hearing about AGI and ASI. A lot of people, and I would probably argue too, is we're probably we're still in the ANI phase, the artificial intelligence phase, although maybe on the cusp of moving into AGI. Not quite sure yet. But, again, we have just got very, very, right now, very, very powerful very powerful machine learning capabilities or, large language learning models that are absolutely, absolutely changing how we do things and allowing us to, again, possibly look at other ways of powering machines, which we'll talk about later. One more thing I'll just flag here as well, which is really important, is when we talk about AI and bring it back to the cybersecurity piece, there's a unit that's little spoken about, which has been reported on, which is unit two two seven. And this unit, which falls under the reconnaissance general bureau, is developing and is pure pure purpose really is to develop AI capabilities for the North Korean state, possibly for its cyber threat actors, to use in operations. And that's partly because every time they try and use a Western company or a different company that is not from North Korea to, again, make their cyber operations more effective, they get caught and they get booted out. So they're building their own native capabilities. And, again, please do not underestimate the North Koreans. When they say they're gonna do something particularly with technology, they have a lot of intent, and they also have a lot of capability, very, very smart operators. So Unit 2271 to look out for. And when we're talking about we can't not talk about AI and cybersecurity without, talking about Mythos. But one thing I like to show here is if you if an actor is trying to get into your house, there's a few different ways they're gonna get in. And your house is is your organization. And, again, we could we could talk about supply chain all day. We could talk about credentials, leaving your keys on the front lawn. We could talk about phishing, someone putting something through your mailbox. We could talk about something physical, someone, you know, literally breaking into an insider, breaking into your facility and smashing up your data center or an insider going in and physically getting what they need out on and shared. But one area which is really, really important, and we have to talk about this, is the you know, we've all heard of mythos, but these frontier models allowing allowing actors to effectively identify open windows, vulnerabilities on a scale that we may not be ready for yet to be confirmed. And, look, Recorder Future has published a blog post on this, which is looking and trying to distinguish between the the the hype and the reality of this this threat. But it it must be said, artificial intelligence, yeah, we're gonna talk about it at a macro level. But for us in the cybersecurity world, it is also allowing these windows to to be uncovered on scales that we, again, may not be able to to prevent, if if some of the stories are to be believed. Okay. So coming back to the bigger picture. If AI is a brain, and we discussed that it, it, of course, you know, relies on GPUs. It needs a body, which right now is in a rack, simplifying this a bit, in a data center. It also needs a lot of food, and that's a lot of energy. And we're seeing, of course, some companies say we're going to build our own nuclear powered centers or or energy facilities right next to these things because we just can't rely on the grid. There's something else happening as well when we talk about AI and and, something I just wanna flag, which is, if you have ever read Sam Altman's blog from 2017, I encourage people to actually read it, called The Merge. It starts to sound eerily familiar to what he was basically saying, although I take, you know, everything with a pinch of salt there because it's it is quite far back in time. But do read it if you're interested. And I look at this technology that's coming out called brain computer interfaces or BCIs as a signal as to where this may be going. And already, you've probably heard of Neuralink. They are pay testing this out with patients who have had serious, medical accidents and, trying to help them ultimately. But, effectively, these things are drilled into the head. You've got these little little hair like fiber optic, sense, you know, sense of relay or whatever you wanna call them. I actually don't know the technical term, but, basically, planted into your brain. And then, again, these things are powered by a degree of, you know, again, AI, LLMs, whatever you wanna call control a screen or controlling with just their right. Is, then I think people are quite, you know, not really talking about it enough. And when you listen to Neuralink's annual conference last year, it's very clear that this is they want to go they want to expand this if possible, we'll see, and roll it out beyond just medic medical patients. And so it's no surprise you start to see headlines like this, and this is from last year. Whether or not this happens is a separate story, but OpenAI eyeing up brain implant start ups. This is a signal around how we're moving into what is being referred to possibly as embodied AI or or forms of embodied AI, maybe some sort of hybrid version here, with with biological beings. So let's simplify things before we move on to the to the, the some of the more fun stuff here. That piece of silicon allows you to build that GPU chip. Again, it lives in a rack. It's powered by energy, lots of it. Right now, the application is probably for most of us here using it on a phone or a laptop, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever it is, or we call it FutureAI. There's a potential, and it's beginning to happen where, thereby, some of this technology is being literally implanted into someone's head. But there is something else that we need to talk about, and that is the physical robotic implantation of this technology, which is going to possibly possibly and likely transform a lot of things. It's all about the application layer, and I like this this cake model here because what it's showing you by the way, people disagree. That's fine. So I've put I'm trying to be a little bit controversial, maybe encourage some debate around who the leaders are in each area. You know, it's to be debated, like I said. But it AI, it's it's not just AI. It's a cake. It's a layer. It's it's a lot of things. We talk a lot about the models. We all know about the models. And you can even argue that, you know, the open source models are actually the Chinese are leading that, and that's actually more significant. But, anyway, you've got to have the energy. You've got to have the chips. You've got to be able to build the infrastructure at scale very quickly. You got to have the models. But one thing that we're not talking about enough is how you apply it, and it goes back to this thing at the start where I said China has spent a lot of time thinking about how you integrate that technology into your economy. That's the key. If you don't have layer five applications solved, it's kind of for nothing. And so that's why we need to talk about machines. Normally, I'd say if I was in a room with people who've seen any of these films, I assume most of you have probably seen I, Robot. If you haven't watched it if you haven't seen it for a while, watch it again. It's gonna sound eerily familiar with some of the things that are happening now. I won't ruin it for everyone. Outside the wire is more about how it's applied in the military environment. And, again, some things are actually scarily beginning to happen now. And the creator is all about how society or two two parts of the world adopt robotics and AI differently. One embraces it. One rejects it. And, again, it's eerily like what's actually beginning to happen in today's geopolitics. So I'd recommend all three, as you know, if you're ever on the road or or or want to watch a film one evening, because it's not science fiction anymore. A lot of this is actually beginning to happen. And these were some of the humanoid robots that were being developed. In fact, many of them tested mainly in factories last year. And ATLAS, is is there. That's ATLAS one. And just so you can get a picture, this is me, in in, in South Korea very recently, actually with ATLAS two. And you can imagine me having studied these things and having seen the signals of where this may be going for a while, being very excited. So put a big old grin there. And that's Atlas one introducing Atlas two, which is being rolled out into certain factories for testing. And what's really fun well, funny is the wrong word. What's really interesting is it's the car manufacturers that are driving this. Tesla probably won't know them in the next ten years for their cars. You'll know them for their Optimus robots if they go the way they're saying they're going. Again, Boston Dynamics owned by Hyundai Hyundai. Again, moving towards this space quite clearly. You've got other companies as well, Toyota, BMW, other other car manufacturers beginning to think about how to use or manufacture them. So it's no surprise then you see headlines like this. Don't take it from me. Take it from headlines like this from Morgan Stanley. By 2050, China will have over 300,000,000 humanoid robots, and The United States will have 77,700,000. We're seeing the robotaxi, the autonomous vehicle revolution already beginning. It's in many cities. And, again, this is likely to help with some of the labor shortages that are inbound. I was just in Tokyo, and it's fascinating. Again, these headlines were coming out saying, we've got a lot of taxi drivers, but because of the aging population, we're gonna need to double down on possibly having more robo taxis because we just will not have the people. You're seeing these machines, these robot these humanoid robots transforming or being aimed or designed to transform manufacturing. Again, less people to make the things, but you can start to build the machines. And then headlines like this, which I've pulled up very recently, say, western executives coming back terrified. This concept of dark factories, where the lights don't even go on because these machines that are moving or these, you know, single single use machines are just operating to such advanced levels that you just do not need a human in there, therefore, no light. That's the idea. Some more headlines for you. Morgan Stanley predicts 13,000,000 human robots will work alongside humans by 2035. I think this is the key thing. With costs dropping to $10,000 annually, making them as affordable as cars, the message there is the intent is there is, although they're quite expensive now, they're gonna get cheaper and cheaper. You're seeing headlines like this. Amazon humanoids consume at your doorstep. Amazon hopes to replace 600,000 US workers with robots. Now I would take that all with a pinch of salt, but the point is is the intent is there on where to use these machines and and these robots, which are designed in certain ways. So these ones here are designed really for lifting and moving boxes. So we've gotta talk about then, of course, the, the military aspect here. And, Again, the headlines are emerging whereby you're seeing things like this. Killer robots are coming. Now I've seen these with my own eyes. I've been to some defense shows, in in in sort of various capacities, and and I was at one very recently, a big one in London, DSCI. And these robots were on the display. That's the first time I've really seen them like that for a lot, you know, since I've been going to some of these events. They are absolutely coming. Now in what form, we don't know. What we do know is they're now being used or variants of these things, which still still controlled by humans, but the point is is is where we're going, this droid here, this was in the news the other day, clearing out Russian positions. And so this is the direction of travel. Very few militaries have grasped this reality, but it is coming if the signals that are being emitted are to be believed. And, again, just look at the economics. The money going into these things is serious. These are some of the big names, the big brands that are actually developing these technologies, and some of them have been in high profile events. I think the figure robot was in the the White House the other day, the other week. Unitary is being shown off at big annual events like Chinese New Year dancing. I'm sure some of you have seen these on TV, even being used in the marathon in China. That's all about conditioning the population. The Chinese government is very clearly conditioning the Chinese population to say, don't be afraid of these things. You are gonna be living among them very soon because we've got no choice due to our population collapse. Now one thing that Kathleen touched on, which there is a report on it, so I'm not gonna dwell too much on it, is how we are very concerned. And I'm particularly concerned, and, you know, one of the you know, I very much looked at this to to to make sure it was out there, that a lot of these robots are poorly secured. We cannot treat them like, well, it's not like any other connected device. They absolutely have the ability to emit and relay back surveillance or to be used as a physical access point into the wider network, therefore causing effectively a cyberattack in the form of an iRobot situation. And in fact, it gets even more scary. Some of the, researchers that were digging into the vulnerabilities uncovered that actually some of these robots through Bluetooth and other means, were they had wormable vulnerabilities. In fact, so one robot that was infected would infect another robot, and it would go on and on and on. So it is serious. These CVEs are real. And the thing is you can buy one of these for as little as sort of $25,000 or so, and you're seeing more and more videos on social media of people buying these and programming them. I've seen one recently of, I think, in Poland, the you know, having one of these to chase balls away, for example. So these things are entering society, as are the quadruped robots. And this is another one, the go one, which again had multiple vulnerabilities in it, and it allowed the, live camera access, imagery to be beamed back if necessary. There was almost this maybe intentionally or unintentionally built in backdoor. And, again, a company like Reunitree have actually come out and said we're aware of it. These are real. This the researchers aren't just trying to scare people. These are real vulnerabilities that have been identified. Some big things happened in 2026, and already in January, you're seeing things like this. And this is what I said earlier. Elon Musk says Tesla will stop producing its x and s model cars as it shifts making robots. And I saw one of these in my own eyes when I went I was in The US recently, and the and we went past a Tesla, shop front, it wasn't the car in the window. It was the Optimus, humanoid robot in the window. And already, you're seeing manufacturing facilities being ramped up and built up to be able to mass produce them. Hyundai, again, stock emerging, and booming around the momentum on this. And even China deploying these and testing out some of these robots at the border with Vietnam and in other policing activities to see if they are able to fill the gap of human labor shortage. So if you've seen I, Robot and you remember this scene where Will Smith is going through what could be potentially compromised machines around him, it starts to look a lot more real. And then when you read the papers from the likes of the Bank of America Institute or Morgan Stanley or the research papers written by some of the people that we reference in the report that you will have access to, it really does look real, and therefore we need to pay attention to it. So why is this happening? Well, there's a simple equation. I'm not very you know, my maths is average, so bear with me on this this very non mathematical equation, but hopefully it makes sense. We've already got robots. They just do one dual thing, a lot of them. They're not intelligent. They just have been programmed in a way. They do one thing, one thing, one thing. So we already get robotics, and robotics is getting better. It's been getting better every year. We now have a massive problem on our hands, and some countries are recognizing this, like China, like Korea, like Japan, that if they do not, and The US is beginning to, if they do not deal with the fact that populations will collapse and therefore bring in some form of other productivity, we are in trouble. And now now we have the means the means to bring these machines to life by literally implanting what we call artificial intelligence, or you may wanna call it an advanced NLM, into their brains. These things have eyes. They have ears. They can sense. They can move. The dexterity of their hands is getting better so they can pick up and do things. It is beginning to come together. And so that equals these projections from the likes of Bank of America, whereby the year 2060 as an estimate, total units ownership of these things, of these human robots, could reach 3,000,000,000, most of which serving in households to cater for a elderly population that will keep getting older, many in the service industry, and I ironically, only a few in the industrial sector. But the industrial sector is where they're being tested. And when you look at the patents, and this is another signal of where these are being developed, who has got the patents mentioning humanoid, China absolutely tears away with the numbers here. 5688. They have over a 150 companies just developing these things already now. And The United States is a close well, not even a close second. 1483 and then, Japan, etcetera, South Korea, and then you start to get a picture of who is gonna dominate this market if this stays as it is. Don't take it from me. That's my assessment. Take it also from the news. China has another solution to its shrinking population. Robots. It's great to see this after we started publishing and talking about this one. And this is there have been other news articles about this, but it's interesting to see now the mainstream news, and and sort of mainstream reporting picking up on the fact that, actually, this is a problem for some of these economies, and they actually have a solution. So here we go. China's birth rate has hit a historic low, deepening fears of a major economic shock in the decades to come as the country's massive labor force dwindles. They've tried to spur procreation a lot of countries, and that's the question I may get is, well, can't you just encourage people to have children? The answer is it's not working for a lot of reasons. So, unfortunately, if you my assessment, it won't work. And it so far failed to stop this downward slide in China. But the country is also eyeing up another potential fix, robots and automation. So it's no surprise when we talk about cyberattacks. When you look at Chinese 15 China's fifteenth five year plan where it looks ahead at what it wants to develop, you've got some of these technologies showing. Right? You've got new energy. So that's to power a lot of this this industrial revolution change, embodied AI, brain computer interfaces. You've been warned. So, one thing as well that we do track, and I'm gonna hand over very quickly to Kathleen, is we're observing through malicious traffic analysis. So we're able to identify communications between victims and CTs, so threat actors. We're able to, at scale, start to analyze a lot of this activity, actually, a lot of cyber activity targeting the robotics industry. And so that's what you're looking at here. And on that note, I will hand over to Kathleen. Great. Thank you. Yes. Similar to what we did before, going to walk through an example of timeline view. This time, instead of we had some discussion around the in six group trust research leads on tracking nation state infrastructure. But this is going down a layer, so to speak, looking actually at the malware families that we're tracking from a malicious traffic analysis perspective, where, in this case, this query was just looked at our malicious traffic analysis. We're excluding some different stealer malwares that are involving the robotics industry in some way, whether that is a specific product, there's IP address or infrastructure we recognize as being associated with robotics companies, all that is included just with that term. And we can see a lot of different async RAT has been a pretty notable RAT in the past two years. It's appeared in the top rat category for really a while now. And then being able to actually dig into the specific IP addresses themselves. So, for example, looking at this puppy rat IP address, this this is an intelligence card looking at an active c two server that we had confirmed just as of yesterday, understanding exactly what it's associated with, again, with puppy rat, when it was first identified. But most importantly, it is important that any of the, you know, malicious traffic analysis, we do make that available for you all to research and look at trends, again, from the geopolitical aspect, how is that impacting what we're seeing in the cyber realm. But with all the data that is out there on these different, infrastructure that's being used by threat actors, being able to incorporate this intelligence directly into your SIM, into your SOAR, being able to feed recorded feature with the information that you all need to track and make those threats more specific to you. That's where all of the intelligence that we have, really important to make sure we're pushing and actioning that data in the different integrations that you have. And one last piece before I hand it back to Joe, especially with the unit tree mentioned. Right? He talked about how the company recognizes that there you know, it's not scare tactic, but that there are, you know, infrastructure that they have that has been used for exfiltration likely in violation of GDPR articles. So being able to understand what that infrastructure is as well as being able to track associated vulnerabilities with unitary, That is also where we can use recorded feature to prioritize those vulnerabilities and to also let you know, are they actually being actively exploited now? Or if not, they still should be patched because there are different risks as Joe has gone through with successfully hacking a robot compared to, say, hacking some other system. With that, I'll pass it back over to Joe to wrap us up and see what questions we have. Alright. Kathleen, thank you. So let's let's wrap this up, and, hopefully, I can get get some questions in. Nations understand these four things really well. If wars will be won if you dominate in these four areas. We talk about warfare. Yes. Your conventional warfare, your logistics, your ships, your planes, you know, your tanks, your your soldiers. But some nations in particular are understanding that cyber warfare, space warfare, and now embodied AI warfare, and, of course, the Ukrainians have been showing us just how powerful some of these new technologies can be on the battlefield against conventional assets. This, if you do not have your ducks in a row, as the English phrase says, in these four areas, you will not win a modern conflict against your adversary if they do have their ducks in a row in these areas. So in conclusion, The US led unipolar liberal rules based international order as we knew it has come to a close, and a new chapter has begun. We don't know quite yet what it is gonna look like. There are signals emerging that it could be bipolar against China. It could be more multipolar. It is still too early to be very, very confident on that. But what we do know is what we had, the last thirty, forty years of exceptional stability, one would argue, despite some of the major conflicts, has come to a close. We are seeing cyber threat actors being deployed now even more en masse to help win the race to dominate the fourth industrial revolution, mining companies, mining contracts, semiconductor supply chain, semiconductor companies, robotics companies, embodied AI companies being targeted. And nation's ambitions will expand into the deep reaches of the sea, Arctic in the North, Antarctica in the South, and what we haven't had time to talk about, and that's maybe for another conversation, which if you wanna talk about space, I can talk about space all day, is space, to harvest new resources that will fuel the revolution. And AI, very, really important we cover this, is only gonna advance as fast as our ability to address that cake, to be able to build semiconductors, scale data centers, generate that power they require, and more importantly, apply it. And those countries that apply it will win this fourth industrial revolution. The robots are coming if things are to be believed, if the trajectories are to continue, and embodied AI is that application phase on that cape. So if we're going to be applying them into our society, either to care for people or to run our factories or to fight in our militaries as we are beginning to do, we must secure them. They are vulnerable, and we, therefore, we need to prepare overall for these changes that are coming. And why all of this? What is our destiny? Well, I've touched on space. I do believe what we are seeing today is the precinct, the the start of that move into outer space. It is our destiny to go beyond this Earth, and I know I may sound a little bit crazy, but when you start to see the news headlines and you will see it more, this will start to make sense. And you see companies like Elon Musk, you know, love him or hate him, that is irrelevant here, this isn't political. If you look at what the companies are doing around him, it is starting to point in that direction, bringing AI together with companies that can bore holes underground, which is what you need on a on a an extraterrestrial planet, the ability to lower cost to launch per kilogram, worth of material into space, the ability to potentially put data centers in space. We're hearing about that. The ability to use solar energy to power entire systems. It is beginning to come together, and humanoid robots, we'll be very clear if we go in the right direction, will be used to build colonies on other moons or planets. I know I sound crazy, but look it up. It will start to make sense. So study the past if you would define the future. Don't be an ostrich. There's too much of this happening. Be a dragonfly. Why a dragonfly? Dragonflies are the most effective predators in the animal kingdom. They use intelligence to monitor every move their adversary makes, their prey makes, and they catch, at the right moment, 95% of that. So may I have time for one question? But ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the fourth industrial revolution. You are now living in it. You are now part of it, so it is time to prepare for it and take some of these signals very, very seriously because it's coming. Thank you again. We have got loads of reports in the platform, and many of them we have made available or versions of it we've made available to the public for you to read. There's a few books there. Again, they've not paid me, but there's a few books there if you do wanna read it that have inspired me with some of this research and to look into this in more detail. And I hope you've enjoyed this and taken something from it. So thank you again. Kathleen, I don't know if we have time for questions. I'll defer to you. actually yeah. One question. Yeah. I mean, thank you so much for going through all of that great information. So many things to think about. I have read The Chip War, but I haven't read those other books, so I'll have to, look into those. So one question, especially because you mentioned, you know, Welcome to the Fourth Industrial, you know, World Order. There was a question on whether you think, you know, this fourth industrial revolution is really what ended the current world order as we as we knew it before. Yeah. It's a fantastic question. It it almost certainly will have a part to play in it, but I think I think this is this is about economies reestablishing their what some of them have seen as their rightful position. And then like I said, you know, countries like not just exclusively China, but countries like China have thought very, very hard about this, and they are using this fourth industrial revolution, this economic shift that's happening with technology to reposition themselves geopolitically as a dominant power, and they make no secret of that. It is very, very public. You just, again, have to see it and read it and understand it to then start to understand where they're going with it. And, again, lots of people, I'm sure, are familiar with their fifteen, you know, or five year plans and their latest one. But please pay attention to those things, and it's not just China releases this sort of documentation on technologies and geopolitical strategy. Most countries actually do this to a degree. So please, please use those signals because it also guides where they put their cyber attackers. Great question. Thank you. I know we're technically out of time, but we do it's the webinar is not kicking us out, so that's not a problem there. There's one other question. Maybe we can end on this since all of getting more into, like, quantum computing, but seeing how, you know, how do you see quantum computing really fitting into this journey and, Yeah. again, the fourth industrial revolution that we're in now? We it's a great question. We've just released we do have a paper on this, which is all about, you know, what what is quantum? Where are we going with quantum computing? It is actually a there's a version of it on our website too. And so, look, quantum computing in terms of when it will be with us, lots of debate on that. Will AI and some of the advances there help us get there sooner? Possibly. There's a good argument for that. One thing I would say, though, for us is is is in the cybersecurity industry, again, is, you know, we offer some of the encryption models we use, again, which is pretty obvious, but I'll say it could be compromised pretty quickly if this if this technology comes out soon. So I would rather people prepare for this to be out sooner rather than later because at least you can get your, again, ducks in a row, your strategy ready now for when some of this technology could cause us some serious issues with our encryption, strategy. So that's the one thing I would just say on that. And one other thing on quantum computing is the strategy of harvest, hack now, harvest later is real. We are seeing cyberattacks whereby encrypted data is being collected with the intention to then decrypt it later. And so that is something, again, to just bear in mind. It is it is happening, and it's covered in our report. That is a real risk. Thank you for the question. Yeah. Great. question. And, yeah, on that report, I posted that blog that the or external report that Joe just mentioned in the chat there for you all to access. Well, thank you again, Joe, so much for going through this presentation. So many things, again, from the history pieces and then so many things to think about in the years to come. And, again, for those who are on the call, being a part of helping, you know, if your companies are involved in using robotics and just nations in general, being a part of that change to make sure that they're being as secure as possible. Right? I'm sure there's a lot of individuals on the call who will be a part of that. So thank you again, Joe. Thank you all for our attendees, for the questions. As I mentioned, this has been recorded, so it will be sent out later. Or if you're watching on the recording, thanks for listening. Hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Kathleen. Thanks.