The explosion of digital uncertainty

Introduction

• Recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) have captured the imagination of the public, businesses and governments alike. The Government of India has also, very recently, released a comprehensive report on the opportunities afforded by this current wave of AI.

Types of Artificial Intelligence (AI):

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines or software, as opposed to the intelligence of humans or animals. It is also the field of study in computer science that develops and studies intelligent machines. “AI” may also refer to the machines themselves.
• Traditional AI, often called Narrow or Weak AI, focuses on performing a specific task intelligently. These systems have the capability to learn from data and make decisions or predictions based on that data.
• Generative AI, on the other hand, can be thought of as the next generation of artificial intelligence. It’s a form of AI that can create something new.

Implications of Generative AI

• Leaders of the IT industry in India are almost certain that this wave of AI will lead to fundamental changes in the skills landscape, and implicitly, in terms of underlying threats and dangers. Concurrently, there is an exponential explosion of digital uncertainty.
• Cognitive warfare truly ranks alongside other elements of modern warfare such as the domains of maritime, air and space. Cognitive warfare puts a premium on sophisticated techniques that are aimed at destabilising institutions, especially governments, and manipulation, among other aspects, of the news media by powerful non state actors. It entails the art of using technological tools to alter the cognition of human targets, who are often unaware of such attempts.
• The end result could be a loss of trust apart from breaches of confidentiality and loss of governance capabilities. Even more dangerous is that it could alter a population’s behaviour using sophisticated psychological techniques of manipulation.
• Today, with almost a third of companies in the more advanced countries of the world investing more in intangible assets than the physical one, they are putting themselves directly at risk from AI. Another estimate is that with over 50% of the market value of the top 500 companies sitting in intangibles, they too are deeply vulnerable.
• As firms, large and small, spend billions of dollars to migrate to the Cloud, and more and more sensors constantly send out sensitive information, the risks go up in geometrical progression. Digital uncertainty is morphing into radical uncertainty and rather rapidly.
• There is not enough understanding of how the very nature of information is being manipulated and the extent to which AI drives many of these drastic transformations. All this contributes to what can only be referred to as ‘truth decay’.

The emergence of AGI

• If AI is the grave threat that the world is currently contemplating, we are only witnessing the tip of the iceberg. What is simultaneously exhilarating and terrorising is the fact that many advances in AI are now being birthed by the machine itself.
• Sooner rather than later, we will witness the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — Artificial Intelligence that is equal and or superior to human intelligence, which will penetrate whole new sectors and replace human judgement, intuition and creativity.
• The impending dawn of AGI is far more disruptive and dangerous than anything else that we have encountered thus far. Social and economic inequalities will rise exponentially. Social anarchy will rule the streets as we see happening in some of the cities closest to the epicentre of technological innovation.
• It has an inherent capacity to flood a country with fake content masquerading as truth, and for imitating known voices with false ones that sound eerily familiar.
• AGI will enable highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in many areas, including economically (valuable) work, education, social welfare and the like.
• It is difficult to comprehend at this point its many manifestations, but job displacements and economic displacements would be initial symptoms of what could become a tsunami of almost all human- related activity.
• It is almost certain to lead to material shifts in the geopolitical balance of power, and in a way never comprehended previously. The spectre of digital colonisation looms large with AGI- based power centres being based in a few specific locations.
• Consequently, AGI-driven disruption could precipitate the dawn of the age of digital colonialism. This would lead to a new form of exploitation, viz., data exploitation. In its most egregious form, it would entail export of raw data and import of value added products that use this data.
• In short, AGI-based concentration of power would have eerie similarities to the old East India Company syndrome. We could possibly be at the cusp of an ‘Oppenheimer Moment’, when the world is at a crossroads in the science of computing, communicating and engineering, and the ethics of a new technology whose power and potential we do not fully comprehend.

The Hamas- Israel conflict

• AI can be exploited and manipulated skilfully in certain situations, as was possibly the case in the current Hamas- Israeli conflict, sometimes referred to as the Yom Kippur War 2023. Israel’s massive intelligence failure is attributed by some experts to an overindulgence of AI by it, which was skillfully exploited by Hamas.
• AI depends essentially on data and algorithms, and Hamas appears to have used subterfuges to conceal its real intentions by distorting the flow of information flowing into Israeli AI systems. Hamas, some experts claim, was thus able to blindside Israeli intelligence and the Israeli High Command.

Conclusion:

• The lesson to be learnt is that an overdependence on AI and a belief in its invincibility could prove to be as catastrophic as ‘locking the gates after the horse has bolted