All courses / Landscape / Module 2 / Chapter 9
Learning objectives
After the lesson the participant can:
- State the chapter's claim precisely: it concerns which harm is discussed first, not whether respondents fear the wrong things.
- Compare failures with attacks as causes of ICT security incidents in Eurostat's 2024 survey.
- Place a claim about AI harm on the five rungs of the evidence ladder.
- Read a one-page landscape in full to find the quiet marks: missing seats and dashed baselines at R3.
Key concepts
- The fear instinct
- Rosling's name for the attention we give to what frightens us, out of proportion to its frequency. Here it lets stories with a frightening shape set the agenda for a board, a council or a newsroom.
- Base rate
- The frequency that turns a story into a share. In Eurostat's 2024 survey, 3.43 per cent of EU enterprises had services made unavailable by an attack from outside, beside 17.97 per cent by hardware or software failure.
- Quiet harm
- A harm with a higher base rate and a less frightening shape: a service failure, fraud, discrimination, a disclosure by mistake, a benefit deprioritised by a ranking nobody can explain. The rule asks which of these a story displaced.
- The evidence ladder
- From AI Threat, Chapter 4: five rungs, fiction, argument, laboratory demonstration, incident in the wild and pattern at scale. A claim is graded at the highest rung its evidence reaches.
- Rule of thumb: base rate and quiet harm
- When a story frightens you, find the base rate and the quiet harm it hides. The rule is for the agenda, not the register, and stops applying when the hazard is real, immediate and in your own landscape.
Interactive exercises
Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.
Interactive exercise 1 · Sort
Loud marks and quiet marks
Sort the marks on Hansa Mutual's landscape of 1 January 2027 as the chapter reads them in the full reading order.
Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario
A motion to pause AI
Read the situation and choose how the official should report, following the chapter's advice to a public official.
Teaching plan
| 10 min | Opening: the teacher reads the Eurobarometer answers of the first paragraph and asks what kind of harm each statement concerns, then tells the story of the missing decimal comma. |
| 25 min | Lecture on the evidence with Figures 9.1 to 9.3: what respondents answered, failures against attacks, ENISA's 4,875 incidents, the subdomain counts of the incident database and the evidence ladder. The two panels of Figure 9.3 are set side by side, not compared. |
| 15 min | Guided reading of Figure 9.4 in the full reading order: the agents at Level 3 Bounded first, then HM-AMB without a seat and the dashed baseline under HM-TL at R3. |
| 30 min | Exercise: participants prepare a two-column briefing for a board or an elected body on one frightening story. |
| 10 min | Closing: where the rule stops applying, and Hansa Mutual's stop drill of 17 minutes against a budget of 5 as the instinct working as it should. |
Discussion
- The chapter says the surveys do not show respondents fearing the wrong things, and that no survey cited measures what boards discuss. Why does the author take such care to limit the claim?
- At Nordvik Region the council asked the rogue-agent question, and the landscape showed a grey square the motion did not ask about. Which question has your own governing body asked, and which mark did it not ask about?
- The rule stops applying to harms that have no base rate yet. How should an organisation keep such a scenario in view without letting it take the decisions the quiet harms need?
Written exercise
Exercise · 30 minutes
Two columns for the agenda
Choose a frightening AI or cyber story that has recently reached your organisation, or take the motion to Nordvik Region's council asking whether the Region should pause its use of AI. Write a one-page briefing with two columns. In the first, give the base rate of that harm from the records the chapter cites, with source and period, and the rung of the evidence ladder the claim reaches. In the second, list the quiet harms the story may have displaced: outages by failure, fraud, complaints about automated decisions, data disclosed by mistake. Then read your own landscape, or Hansa Mutual's in Figure 9.4, in the full reading order and name the Mode 0 marks without a seat and the dashed baselines at R3 Hard to reverse.
Deliverable: A one-page, two-column briefing with base rate, ladder rung and displaced quiet harms, ending with the named quiet marks and one decision proposed for each.
Self-test
Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.
In Eurostat's 2024 survey, for which consequence of an ICT security incident does the malicious cause edge ahead of failure or mistake?
Show the answer
B. Disclosure of confidential data
Confidential data were disclosed through intrusion, phishing or intentional actions at 1.57 per cent of enterprises, against 1.15 per cent through employees' unintentional actions. For unavailable services and destroyed data, failure is the more frequent cause.On the evidence ladder, as the chapter applies it, where do agents acting beyond their mandate stand today?
Show the answer
C. Incident in the wild, the fourth of the five rungs
Fraud and discrimination by means of AI are patterns at scale; agents acting beyond their mandate are incidents in the wild; a system escaping control altogether has not left argument and laboratory demonstration, and the claim that it will is speculation.Read in the full order, which two marks on Hansa Mutual's landscape of 1 January 2027 does the chapter say need a decision?
Show the answer
A. The Mode 0 square HM-AMB at Level 4 without a seat, and HM-TL with a dashed baseline at R3
The agents at Level 3 Bounded carry filled diamonds, seats and solid baselines and are the best-governed marks on the page. The marks needing a decision are the unseated Mode 0 square and the recruitment screening service whose proof at R3 is the supplier's attestation.