III. Focus Tasks

Based on the overall picture of national development, accurately grasp the global development trends of AI, find the correct openings for breakthroughs and directions for the main thrust, comprehensively strengthen basic science and technology innovation capabilities, comprehensively expand the depth and breadth of application in focus areas, and comprehensively enhance the built-in intelligence levels of applications in economic and social development, as well as in national defence.

(1) Build open and coordinated AI science and technology innovation systems

Focus on increasing the supply of AI innovation sources; strengthen deployments in areas such as advanced basic theory, key general technologies, basic platforms, talent teams, etc.; stimulate open-source sharing; systematically enhance sustained innovation capabilities; ensure that our country’s AI science and technology levels ascend to the leading global ranks; and make ever more contributions to the development of global AI.

1. Establish basic theory systems for a new generation of AI

Focus on major advanced scientific AI questions; concurrently deal with present needs and long-term developments; make breakthroughs in basic AI application theory bottlenecks; give priority to deploying basic research that may trigger paradigmatic change in AI; stimulate the intersection and convergence of disciplines; and provide powerful scientific reserves for the sustained development and profound application of AI.

Make breakthroughs in basic application theory bottlenecks. Aim at basic theoretical orientations with clear applied objectives, which promise to trigger an upgrade of AI technology, strengthen basic theoretical research on big data intelligence, cross-media sensing and computing, human-machine blended intelligence, mass intelligence, autonomous cooperation and decision-making, etc. Focus on breakthroughs in big data intelligence, unsupervised learning, comprehensive deep reasoning and other such difficult issues. Establish data-driven cognitive computing models with natural language understanding at the core, and shape capabilities to go from big data to knowledge, and from knowledge to decision-making. Focus on breakthroughs in cross-media sensing and computing theory, including theories and methods for: low-cost and low-energy smart sensing, active sensing in complex landscapes, listening comprehension in the natural environment as well as language sensing, autonomous multimedia learning, etc. Realize superhuman sensing and highly-dynamic, high-dimensional, and multi-model distributed large-landscape sensing. The focuses on breakthroughs in blended and enhanced intelligence theory are: theories on human-machine cooperative and blended environmental understanding, decision-making, and learning; intuitive reasoning and causal models, recall and knowledge evolution, etc.; realizing blended and enhanced intelligence where learning and reflection approach or exceed human intelligence levels.

The focuses for breakthroughs in collective intelligence theory are:

Theories and methods for the organization, emergence and learning of collective intelligence; establishment of expressible and computable mass intelligence incentive algorithms and models; and shaping Internet-based collective intelligence theory systems. The focuses for breakthroughs in autonomous coordination, control and optimized decision-making theory are: theories concerning coordination sensing and interaction aimed at autonomous unmanned systems; autonomous coordination control and optimized decision-making; knowledge-driven human-machine-object triangular coordination and interoperation, etc.; and shaping novel theoretical systems and frameworks for innovation in autonomous intelligence and unmanned systems.

Arrange advanced basic theoretical research. Aim for a direction that may trigger a paradigmatic change in AI, far-sightedly arrange research on high-level machine learning, brain-inspired intelligence computing, quantum smart computing, and other such cross- domain basic theories. The focuses for breakthroughs in high-level machine learning theory are theories and methods concerning self-adaptive learning, autonomous learning, etc., and realizing AI with high interpretative and strong generalization capabilities. The focuses for breakthroughs in brain-inspired intelligence computing theory are: theories concerning brain-inspired information encoding, processing, recall, learning and reasoning; the creation of brain-inspired complex systems and brain-inspired control theories and methods; and establishment of new large-scale brain-inspired intelligence computing models and brain-inspired understanding computing models. The focuses for breakthroughs in quantum computing theory are: methods for quantum-accelerated machine learning; establishment of high-performance computing and quantum computing convergence models; and shaping high-efficiency, accurate, and autonomous quantum AI system setups.

Launch cross-disciplinary exploratory research. Promote the intersection and convergence of AI with neurology, cognitive science, quantum science, psychology, mathematics, economics, sociology and other such related basic disciplines; strengthen basic theoretical mathematical research to guide the development of AI algorithms and models; focus on researching the basic theoretical questions of AI legal principles; support exploratory research that is strongly original, and where there is no consensus; encourage scientists to explore freely; dare to overcome front-line scientific difficulties in AI; create ever more original theory; and make ever more original discoveries.

2. Build a next-generation AI key general technology system

Focusing on the urgent need to raise China’s international competitiveness in AI, next- generation AI key general technology R&D and deployment should make algorithms the core; data and hardware the foundation; and upping capabilities in sensing and recognition, knowledge computing, cognitive reasoning, executing motion, and human- machine interface the emphasis; in order to form openly compatible, stable and mature technological systems.

Knowledge computing engine and knowledge service technology. Key breakthroughs in knowledge processing, deep search, and visual interactive core technology; realization of automatic acquisition of incrementally growing knowledge; possession of concept discernment, object discovery, attribute prediction, evolutionary knowledge modeling, and relationship discovery capabilities; the formation of multi-billion-scale, multi-source, multi-disciplinary, multi-data type, and cross-medium knowledge maps.

Cross-medium analytical reasoning technology. Key breakthroughs in cross-medium unified indicators; relational understanding and knowledge mining; knowledge map structure and learning; knowledge evolution and reasoning; intelligent description and generation, etc., technology. Realization of cross-medium knowledge indicators, analysis, mining, reasoning, evolution, and utilization. Construct analytic reasoning engines.

Key swarm intelligence technology. Key breakthroughs on the basis of the popularization of the internet, mass collaboration, knowledge resource management, and open sharing, etc., technologies. Building frameworks to display swarm intelligence knowledge. Realize the integration and strengthening of swarm intelligence-based knowledge acquisition and swarm intelligence under open development conditions. Support swarm perception, cooperation, and evolution at a national, tens-of-millions scale.

New architecture and new technology for hybrid and enhanced intelligence. Key breakthroughs in human-machine interaction for perception and execution integration models, new types of intelligent computing-fronted sensors, common use hybrid architecture, etc., core technologies. Build autonomous, environmentally adaptable hybrid enhanced intelligent systems, human-machine hybrid enhanced intelligent systems and support environments.

Intelligent technologies of autonomous unmanned systems. Key breakthroughs in autonomous unmanned system computing architecture, complex situational environment perception and understanding, real-time accurate positioning, adaptable, intelligent navigation in complex environments, etc., general technologies. Unmanned and autonomously controlled systems including automobiles, ships, automatic driving in traffic, etc., intelligent technologies. Develop service robots, special-purpose robots, etc., core technologies and support unmanned system application and manufacturing development.

Intelligent virtual reality modeling technology. Key breakthroughs in intelligent modeling technology for virtual counterparts. Increasing the sociality, diversity, and lifelike quality of virtual reality intelligent counterpart behavior. Realize the organic integration, high efficiency, and interactivity of virtual reality and augmented reality, etc., technologies.

Intelligent computing chips and systems. Key breakthroughs in high energy efficiency, reconfigurable brain-inspired computing chips and brain-inspired visual sensor systems with computational imaging capabilities. Research and develop high-efficiency brain-inspired neural network architectures and hardware systems with autonomous learning capabilities. Realize brain-inspired intelligent systems with multimedia sensory information understanding, intelligence growth, and common sense reasoning capabilities.

Natural language processing technology. Key breakthroughs in natural language grammar logic, word-concept symbols, and deep semantic analysis core technologies. Advance effective human-machine communication and free interaction. Realize multi-style, multi- language, multi-domain natural language intelligent understanding and automated [results] generation.

3. Coordinate the layout of AI innovation platforms

Construct AI innovation platforms. Strengthen the foundational support for AI research and development and applications. AI open-source hardware and software infrastructure platforms should focus on building and supporting unified computing frameworks for knowledge reasoning, probability statistics, depth learning, and other AI paradigms. Form and promote an ecological chain of platforms for interaction and synergies among AI software, hardware, and intelligent clouds. The group intelligent service platform should focus on the construction of knowledge resource management and the open sharing tools based on the large-scale cooperation on the Internet. Create a platform and service environment for the innovation of the industry and university. The hybrid enhanced intelligent support platforms should focus on the construction of a heterogeneous real- time computing engine supporting large-scale training and a new computing clusters, providing a service-oriented, systematic platform and solution for complex intelligent computing. Autonomous unmanned system support platform focuses on the construction of autonomous system environmental awareness, autonomous collaborative control, intelligent decision-making and other AI common core technology support systems. Create development and test environments for open, modular, reconfigurable autonomous unmanned systems. AI basic data and security detection platforms should focus on the construction of AI for the public data resource library, the standard test data set, cloud service platform, the formation of AI algorithms and platform security test evaluation methods, techniques, norms and tools, promoting the open sourcing and openness of all kinds of common software and technology platform. Promote military-civilian sharing and joint use for all kinds of platforms in accordance with the requirements of deep military- civil integration related provisions.

2. Forcefully develop new AI industries

Accelerate the transformation and application of key AI technologies, stimulate the integration of technologies with commercial model innovation, promote the innovation of smart products in focus areas, vigorously foster new AI business models, compose high- end industry chains, and forge AI industry groups with international competitiveness.

Smart software and hardware. Develop operating systems, databases, intermediary devices, development tools, and other such key software and hardware aimed at AI; make breakthroughs in graphic processing and other such core hardware; research solution plans for smart systems in pattern recognition, voice understanding, machine translation, smart interaction, knowledge processing, control and decision-making, etc.; and foster and expand basic software and hardware industries aimed at AI.

Smart robots. Tackle core components and special sensors for smart robots, perfect hardware interface standards, software interface standards, and safe usage standards for smart robots. Research and develop smart industrial robots and smart service robots, realize large-scale application, and enter into global markets. Research, produce, and popularize space robots, maritime robots, polar robots, and other such special kinds of smart robots. Establish smart robot standard systems and security norms.

Smart delivery tools. Develop self-driving vehicles and rail traffic systems; strengthen the integration and coordination of vehicle load sensing, automatic driving, the Internet of cars, the Internet of Things, and other such technologies; develop smart traffic sensing systems, create national indigenous automatic driving platform technology systems and industrial assembly capabilities; and explore self-driving vehicle sharing models. Develop consumer and commercial unmanned aircraft and unmanned ships, and establish and trial specialized service systems for authentication, monitoring, technology competition, etc., perfect management measures for the space and maritime areas.

Virtual reality and augmented reality. Make breakthroughs in key technologies such as high-performance software modelling, content capturing and generation, augmented reality and human-machine interaction, integrated environments and tools, etc. Research and create virtual display devices, optical devices, high-performance three-dimensional display devices, development engines, and other such products. Establish standards and evaluation systems for virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, products, and services, and promote their converged application in focus sectors.

Smart terminals. Accelerate the research and development of smart terminal core technologies and products, develop new-generation smart phones, on-board smart terminals for cars, and other such mobile smart terminal products and equipment. Encourage the research and development of smart watches, smart earpieces, smart glasses, and other such wearable terminal products, and expand product forms and application services.

Basic Internet of Things devices. Develop high-sensitivity and highly reliable smart sensors and chips supporting the new-generation Internet of Things. Make progress in core Internet of Things technologies such as RFID and short-distance machine communications, as well as key components such as low-power processors.

(2) Strengthen military-civilian integration in the AI domain

Deepen implementation of military-civilian integration development strategy, to promote the formation of an all-element, multi-field, high efficiency AI military-civilian integration pattern. Build new generation AI based on research and development in the common theory and critical common technology. Establish mechanisms to normalize communication and coordination among scientific research institutes, universities, enterprises and military industry units. Promote military-civilian two-way transformation of AI technology. Strengthen a new generation of AI technology as a strong support to command and decision-making, military deduction, defense equipment, and other applications. Guide defense domain AI technology toward civilian applications. Encourage and advantage people’s scientific research forces to participate in the domain of national defense for major scientific and technological innovation tasks in AI. Promote all kinds of AI technology to become quickly embedded in the field of national defense innovation.

Strengthen the construction of military and civilian AI technology standard systems. Promote the overall layout and open sharing of science and technology innovation platforms and bases.

(1) Establish an AI security supervision and evaluation system

Strengthen research and evaluation of the influence of AI on national security and secrecy protection; improve the security protection system of human, technology, material, and management support; and construct an early warning mechanism of AI security monitoring. Strengthen the development of AI technology prediction, research and follow- up research, adhere to a problem-oriented, accurate grasping of technology and industry trends. Enhance the awareness of risk, pay attention to risk assessment and prevention and control, and strengthen prospective prevention and restraint guidance. In the near term focus on the impact on employment, with a long-term focus on the impact on social ethics, to ensure that the development of AI falls with the sphere of secure and controllable. Establish and improve an open and transparent AI supervision system, the implementation of design accountability, and application of the supervision of a two-tiered regulatory structure, to achieve management of the whole process of AI algorithm design, product development and results application. Promote AI industry and enterprise self- discipline, and earnestly strengthen management, increase disciplinary efforts aimed at the abuse of data, violations of personal privacy, and actions contrary to moral ethics.

Strengthen AI cybersecurity technology research and development, strengthen AI products and systems cybersecurity protection. Develop dynamic AI research and development evaluation mechanisms, focus on AI design, product and system complexity, risk, uncertainty, interpretability, potential economic impact, and other issues. Develop a systematic testing methods and indicators system. Construct a cross-domain AI test platform to promote AI security certification, and assessment of AI products and systems key performance.

READ ALSO: China’s Next-Gen Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (Part 1)

The post China’s Next-Gen Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (Part 2) appeared first on IMR.

Introduction

On July 20, China’s State Council issued a seminal document, entitled “A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan.” This important aspirational document sets out a top-level design blueprint charting the country’s approach to developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology and applications, setting broad goals up to 2030. This is a translated extract.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) will profoundly change human society and life and change the world. To seize the major strategic opportunity for the development of AI, to build China’s first-mover advantage in the development of AI, to accelerate the construction of an innovative nation and global power in science and technology, in accordance with the requirements of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council, this plan has been formulated.

I. The Strategic Situation

The development of AI has entered a new stage. After sixty years of evolution, especially in mobile Internet, big data, supercomputing, sensor networks, brain science, and other new theories and new technologies, under the joint impetus of powerful demands of economic and social development, AI’s development has accelerated, displaying deep learning, cross-domain integration, man-machine collaboration, the opening of swarm intelligence, autonomous control, and other new characteristics. Big data-driven cognitive learning, cross-media collaborative processing, and man-machine collaboration-strengthened intelligence, swarm integrated intelligence, and autonomous intelligent systems have become the focus of the development of AI. The results of brain science research inspired human-like intelligence that awaits action; the trends involving the chips, hardware, and platform have become apparent; the development of AI has entered into a new stage. At present, the development a new generation of AI and related disciplines, theoretical modeling, technological innovation, hardware and software upgrades, etc., all advance, provoking chain-style breakthroughs, promoting the acceleration of the elevation of economic and social domains from digitization and networkization to intelligentization.

AI has become a new focus of international competition. AI is a strategic technology that will lead in the future; the world’s major developed countries are taking the development of AI as a major strategy to enhance national competitiveness and protect national security; intensifying the introduction of plans and strategies for this core technology, top talent, standards and regulations, etc.; and trying to seize the initiative in the new round of international science and technology competition. At present, China’s situation in national security and international competition is more complex, and [China] must, looking at the world, take the development of AI to the national strategic level with systemic layout, take the initiative in planning, firmly seize the strategic initiative in the new stage of international competition in AI development, to create new competitive advantage, opening up the development of new space, and effectively protecting national security.

AI has become a new engine of economic development. AI has become the core driving force for a new round of industrial transformation, [which] will advance the release of the huge energy stored from the previous scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, and create a new powerful engine, reconstructing production, distribution, exchange, consumption, etc., links in economic activities; with new demands taking shape from the macro to the micro within each domain of intelligentization; with the birth of new technologies, new products, new industries, new formats, new models; triggering significant changes in economic structure, profound changes in human modes of production, lifestyle, and thinking; and a whole leap of achieving social productivity.

AI brings new opportunities for social construction. China is currently in the decisive stage of comprehensively constructing a moderately prosperous society. The challenges of population aging, environmental constraints, etc., remain serious. The widespread use of AI in education, medical care, pensions, environmental protection, urban operations, judicial services, and other fields will greatly improve the level of precision in public services, comprehensively enhancing the people’s quality of life. AI technologies can accurately sense, forecast, and provide early warning of major situations for infrastructure facilities and social security operations; grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner; and take the initiative in decision-making and reactions-which will significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance, playing an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.

The uncertainties in the development of AI create new challenges. AI is a disruptive technology with widespread influence that may cause: transformation of employment structures; impact on legal and social theories; violations of personal privacy; challenges in international relations and norms; and other problems. It will have far-reaching effects on the management of government, economic security, and social stability, as well as global governance. While vigorously developing AI, we must attach great importance to the potential safety risks and challenges, strengthen the forward-looking prevention and guidance on restraint, minimize risk, and ensure the safe, reliable, and controllable development of AI.

China possesses a favorable foundation for the development of AI. The nation has: deployed the National Key Research and Development Plan’s key special projects, such as intelligent manufacturing; issued and implemented the “Internet +” and AI Three-Year Activities and Implementation Program, releasing a series of measures from science and technology research and development; and promoted applications and industrial development, and other aspects. As a result of many years of continuous accumulation, China has achieved important progress in the field of AI, with the number of international scientific and technology papers published and the number of inventions patented ranked second in the world, while achieving important breakthroughs in certain domains of core crucial technologies. Leading the world in voice recognition and visual recognition technologies; initially possessing the capability for leapfrog development in adaptive autonomous learning, intuitive sensing, comprehensive reasoning, hybrid intelligence, and swarm intelligence, etc.; with Chinese information processing, intelligent monitoring, biometric identification, industrial robots, service robots, and unmanned driving gradually entering practical application; AI innovation and entrepreneurship have become increasingly active, and a number of leading enterprises have accelerated their growth, receiving widespread concern and recognition internationally. Accelerate the accumulation of technological capabilities and massive data resources, the organization integration of both the huge demand for applications and an open market environment, which together constitute China’s unique advantage in AI development.

At the same time, we must also clearly see that there is still a gap between China’s overall level of development of AI relative to that of developed countries-lacking major original results in the basic theory, core algorithms, key equipment, high-end chips, major products and systems, foundational materials, components, software and interfaces, etc. Scientific research institutions and enterprises do not yet possess international influence upon ecological cycles and supply chain, lacking a systematic research and development layout; cutting-edge talent for AI is far from meeting demand. Adapting to the development of AI requires the urgent improvement of basic infrastructure, policies and regulations, and standards systems.

Facing a new situation and new demands, we must take the initiative to pursue and adapt to change, firmly seize the major historic opportunity for the development of AI, stick closely to development, study and evaluate the general trends, take the initiative to plan, grasp the direction, seize the opportunity, lead the world in new trends in the development of AI, serve economic and social development, and support national security, promoting the overall elevation of the nation’s competitiveness and leapfrog development.

II. The Overall Requirements

(1) The Basic Principles

Technology-Led. Grasp the global development trend of AI, highlight the deployment of forward-looking research and development, explore the layout in key frontier domains, long-term support, and strive to achieve transformational and disruptive breakthroughs in theory, methods, tools, and systems; comprehensively enhance original innovation capability in AI, accelerate the construction of a first-mover advantage, to achieve high- end leading development.

Systems Layout. According to the different characteristics of foundational research, technological research and development, industrial development, and commercial applications, formulate a targeted systems development strategy. Fully give play to the advantages of the socialist system to concentrate forces to do major undertakings, promote the planning and layout of projects, bases, and a talent pool, organically link already-deployed major projects and new missions, continue current urgent needs and long-term development echelons, construct innovation capacity, create a collaborative force for institutional reforms and the policy environment.

Market-Dominant. Follow the rules of the market, remain oriented toward application, highlight companies’ choices on the technological line and primary role in the development of commercial product standards, accelerate the commercialization of AI technology and results, and create a competitive advantage. Grasp well the division of labor between government and the market, better take advantage of the government in planning and guidance, policy support, security and guarding, market regulation, environmental construction, the formulation of ethical regulations, etc.

Open-Source and Open. Advocate the concept of open-source sharing, and promote the concept of industry, academia, research, and production units each innovating and in principal pursuing joint innovation and sharing. Follow the coordinated development law for economic and national defense construction; promote two-way conversion and application for military and civilian scientific and technological achievements and co-construction and sharing of military and civilian innovation resources; form an all-element, multi-domain, highly efficient new pattern of civil-military integration. Actively participate in global research and development and management of AI, and optimize the allocation of innovative resources on a global scale.

(2) Strategic Objectives

These are divided into the following three steps:

First, by 2020, the overall technology and application of AI will be in step with globally advanced levels, the AI industry will have become a new important economic growth point, and AI technology applications will have become a new way to improve people’s livelihoods, strongly supporting [China’s] entrance into the ranks of innovative nations and comprehensively achieving the struggle toward the goal of a moderately prosperous society.

—By 2020 China will have achieved important progress in a new generation of AI theories and technologies. It will have actualized important progress in big data intelligence, cross-medium intelligence, swarm intelligence, hybrid enhanced intelligence, and autonomous intelligence systems, and will have achieved important progress in other foundational theories and core technologies; the country will have achieved iconic advances in AI models and methods, core devices, high-end equipment, and foundational software.

—The AI industry’s competitiveness will have entered the first echelon internationally. China will have established initial AI technology standards, service systems, and industrial ecological system chains. It will have cultivated a number of the world’s leading AI backbone enterprises, with the scale of AI’s core industry exceeding 150 billion RMB, and exceeding 1 trillion RMB as driven by the scale of related industries.

—The AI development environment will be further optimized, opening up new applications in important domains, gathering a number of high-level personnel and innovation teams, and initially establishing AI ethical norms, policies, and regulations in some areas.

Second, by 2025, China will achieve major breakthroughs in basic theories for AI, such that some technologies and applications achieve a world-leading level and AI becomes the main driving force for China’s industrial upgrading and economic transformation.

—By 2025, a new generation of AI theory and technology system will be initially established, as AI with autonomous learning ability achieves breakthroughs in many areas to obtain leading research results.

—The AI industry will enter into the global high-end value chain. This new-generation AI will be widely used in intelligent manufacturing, intelligent medicine, intelligent city, intelligent agriculture, national defense construction, and other fields, while the scale of AI’s core industry will be more than 400 billion RMB, and the scale of related industries will exceed 5 trillion RMB.

—By 2025 China will have seen the initial establishment of AI laws and regulations, ethical norms and policy systems, and the formation of AI security assessment and control capabilities.

Third, by 2030, China’s AI theories, technologies, and applications should achieve world- leading levels, making China the world’s primary AI innovation center, achieving visible results in intelligent economy and intelligent society applications, and laying an important foundation for becoming a leading innovation-style nation and an economic power.

—China will have formed a more mature new-generation AI theory and technology system. The country will achieve major breakthroughs in brain-inspired intelligence, autonomous intelligence, hybrid intelligence, swarm intelligence, and other areas, having important impact in the domain of international AI research and occupying the commanding heights of AI technology.

—AI industry competitiveness will reach the world-leading level. AI should be expansively deepened and greatly expanded into production and livelihood, social governance, national defense construction, and in all aspects of applications, will become an expansive core technology for key systems, support platforms, and the intelligent application of a complete industrial chain and high-end industrial clusters, with AI core industry scale exceeding 1 trillion RMB, and with the scale of related industries exceeding 10 trillion RMB.

—China will have established a number of world-leading AI technology innovation and personnel training centers (or bases), and will have constructed more comprehensive AI laws and regulations, and an ethical norms and policy system.

(3) Overall Deployment

The development of AI is a complex systemic project related to the overall situation, that must be arranged in accordance with “build one system, grasp the two attributes, adhere to the trinity, and strengthen the four supports” to form a strategic path for the healthy and sustainable development of AI.

Construct an open and cooperative AI technology innovation system. Target the weak foundation in original theories, and the key difficulties and deficiencies in major products and systems. Establish foundational theories  and a common technology system for a new generation of AI, laying out the construction of a major scientific and technological innovation base. Strengthen the high-end talent team in AI to promote innovation and cooperative interactions. Form a continuous innovation capability for AI.

Grasp AI’s characteristic high degree of integration of technological attributes and social attributes. It is necessary not only to increase efforts in the research and development and applications of AI, maximizing the potential of AI, but also to predict AI’s challenges, coordinate industrial policies, innovate in policies and social policies, achieve the coordination of encouraging development and reasonable regulation, and maximize risk prevention.

Adhere to the promotion of the trinity of breakthroughs in AI research and development, product applications, and fostering industry development. Adapt to the characteristics and trends of AI development. Strengthen the deep integration of the innovation chain and industrial chain, the interactive evolution of technology supply and market demand. Take technological breakthroughs to promote domain applications and industrial upgrading.

Through application demonstrations, promote the optimization of technologies and systems. At the same time as greatly promoting technology applications and industrial development, strengthen long-term R&D layout and research. Achieve rolling development and continuous improvement. Ensure that theory is in the front, the technological commanding heights are occupied, and applications are secure and controllable.

Fully support science and technology, the economy, social development, and national security. Drive comprehensive elevation on national innovative capability with AI technological breakthroughs. Lead in the process of constructing a global science and technology power. Through strengthening intelligent industry and cultivating the intelligent economy, create a new growth cycle for China’s next decade or even decades of economic prosperity. Through building an intelligent society, promote the improvement of people’s livelihoods and welfare and implement people-centric development thinking. Through AI, elevate national defense strength and assure and protect national security.

READ ALSO: China’s Next-Gen Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (Part 2)

The post China’s Next-Gen Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (Part 1) appeared first on IMR.

The idea of AI weapon-ization often begins with a one line statement that says- “What AI will do in the future, we don’t know!” OR what the future with AI holds for humanity, civilization, and the life on the planet – “we have no clue about it!”

This is something that is never seen before in any military or commercial product, even Robert Oppenheimer was quite sure about the fact that what he was creating is a weapon of mass destruction! So promoting such a level of ‘conscious irresponsibility,’ a culture of unaccountability, and an acceptance toward it – is a new kind of experiment in itself!

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer (1945), quoting from Bhagavad-Gita after the first nuclear detonation.

While discussing the Weaponization of AI, often too much emphasis is being given to the ‘machine intelligence’ aspects alone, and there is an ignorance toward the basic fact that there are the teams of psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and social behaviors experts – the real ‘Human Intelligence’ that works behind these systems!

A few days back, former Google Chairman & CEO, Eric Schmidt, while speaking at a US Naval War College event, raised some interesting points about winning AI’s strategic competition, when he said: “think about the Chinese app TikTok, which is the number one app in America today, and they know where your teenager is, probably you don’t!” And then he asked the audience – “is it OK if a Chinese company knows where your teenager is? At the moment it seems to be OK but is it okay in the future?” And Eric often raises the questions like “how do you feel about your child having a best friend be non-human?”

Now the point is Eric Schmidt’s concern about his country and their kids and teenagers’ growing engagement on non-American AI platforms is okay, these are some valid concerns! But what about us, how India, which comes next after the US and China in the list of most online countries in the world, and where Gen Z (the generation born between 1997 and 2012) is the biggest target audience of these AI-enabled social platforms, should see this absolute and ever-growing control of American AI tools and platforms in our market and in our minds? How should we see their psychological experiments, going live 24/7 with our people?

In the case of India, things are now going to a different level. A few days back, Elon Musk tweeted some CIA spying kind of meme, and when the people reacted to that he responded: “I would be shocked if I’m *not* being spied on.” Many people reacted to that tweet with more interesting memes, a number of them were from India too, and it looks like a normal and frank conversation about the realities of the internet and CIA snooping! But this is something to think about. It’s about the normalization of ‘mass surveillance’ by a foreign product and their agency, something which they often criticize about China or Russia, back home.

The weaponization of AI is not going to be some one-time ‘doomsday’ type event where all of a sudden the AI and Robots will take over the human systems and we will be left with only two choices- either install Neuralink’s Brain Chip to better fight with AI or to migrate to some other nearby planet on SpaceX’s Starship, as Elon Musk often predicts. Rather, it’s a deliberate and psychologically designed process of preparing the human minds, to accept a certain future, that fulfills certain objectives, and it is more about voluntarily and happily giving up before the control! The need, therefore, is to have a mountaintop view of the situation.

And in this broader view, the ease with which 4.9 billion internet users turned hostages to tech platforms’ filtered worldview (on the click of a mouse) in the Russia-Ukraine War, the absolute absence of Russian narrative from the internet, targeted battalions of Influencers waging frequent attacks on every move of democratically elected governments, frequent acts of adventure/misadventure and stunts on ‘information superhighways’ under the name of ‘freedom of speech,’ the forced shutdown of former US president and his supporters on the social media, power in the hands of terrorist and separatists elements, capabilities in the hands of organizations like PFI and SFJ to rage riots and mass violence on streets within a few minutes of mobilization and a constant amplification of political/ social/ economic and democratic chaos, all comes under the broader definition of “Weaponization of AI.”

And when 98 years old Henry Kissinger suddenly teams up with former Google CEO and starts talking about AI and our “human future,” in his typical Kissingerian approach, and when Dr. Kai Fu Lee, ex-Google China Head and Founder of Sinovation Ventures, speaks about the division of AI’s strategic pie between two superpowers (in his book AI Superpowers – China-Silicon Valley and the New World Order) to save humanity, such trends also comes under the broader definition of weaponization of AI as well!

But there is an interesting history and background behind such an approach, which some mathematicians and scientists belonging to the early development of these technologies highlighted in their works. One such mathematician Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics, writes in his book “Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” that “Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position, which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil.” And “we can only hand it over to the world that exists about us…and this is the world of Hiroshima and Belsen.”

Some Background

A common feature in all popular discussions around AI is that they are always future-oriented, and somewhere there is a ‘smart ignorance’ about the past, about the background that led to the creation of this improvisation. For example, on AI, people often prefer to start from the Dartmouth Conference, 1956, where the idea of AI was first presented as: “any computer program that does something that we would normally think of as intelligent in humans.” By starting from there, they smartly ignore the background of such conferences, or the whole series of the conferences/seminars that were conducted from 1946 to 1953, which were popularly called the Macy Conferences (as they were hosted by the Macy Foundation) or those that were conducted in parallel to that – the Ratio Club meetings of the British.

It is worth noting that those meetings and seminars were not attended by mathematicians and engineers fraternities alone, they were attended by biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, physiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists and produced several thought-provoking ideas on humans, their biological, psychological, social and behavioral aspects.

And it was during this time that Pentagon’s obsession with ‘Psychology’ was at its peak. Several historical documents validate that there was an increase of over 1000% in the hiring of Psychologists for the Pentagon’s tech-related projects!

So calling AI a product of only algorithmic advances and machine intelligence, ignoring its background and future trajectory, in many ways a hurdle in understanding its potential as a Weapon!

 Neocortical Warfare and Decision Making

The term “Neocortical Warfare” frequently appears in the US military literature on Information Warfare. The ‘Neocortex,’ region of the brain, the six-layered cortex where higher brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, and generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, and language functions originate from, is the new focus of AI-led future warfare too.

In his article “Neocortical Warfare: towards the acme of skill,” published in US journal, Military Review (Nov 1994), Col Richard Szafranski (USAF) used the term ‘Neocortex,’ as a metaphor to refer enemy’s collective decision-making structures, and mentioned that: “the aim [of neocortical warfare] is not merely to avoid battles. The aim is to influence, even to the point of regulating the consciousness, perception, and will of the enemy’s leadership: the enemy’s Neocortical System.”

The question is who would be an ‘adversary’ in such cognitive and neocortical warfare, where the target is the ‘Neocortex’ of Decision Making Structures and belief systems?

Case of Bharat

It is said that grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the battle and calculating ahead, and sometimes it is wise to lose some battles but win the final war! At this moment, we seem to be losing a few battles, at least on the narrative front!

Somewhere there are assumptions in our system that Bharat cannot provide a resolution or solution to technology related issues or human-tech dilemmas, we cannot recognize these challenges and their Headquarters as a ‘Threat,’ and cannot stretch our visuals beyond territorial challenges, which in simple words means that we will have to remain a follower of technology/trends and their routine improvisations, even if they continue to work on ‘thousand cuts’ principle, against our national security interests!

So if we could apply the ‘Neocortex’ analogy here, the presence of such assumptions in our country’s belief system can be seen as the early sign of a strategically planned ‘Neocortical warfare’ campaign launched against us, which has the potential to influence our choices, our decisions, and our overall ‘will’ to fight, without us being aware of it!

The time has come to reject such assumptions, even if it requires first, waging a guerrilla war on our minds, notions, and assumptions!

Conclusion

“You see things, and say ‘Why?’ But I dream of things that never were, and I say; ‘Why not?’”

This quote appears on the first page of the military document of the US Air Force 2025 study (published in 1996) where the rough craft of future information war-fighting capabilities was given. The ‘Why Not’ part of this quotation reflects a mindset! It’s about a way of thinking, which need not be as imaginative as it sounds in the first place, but it possesses a determination to stay ahead of a few cycles faster than the opponent’s OODA loop.

When we trace the phase of the accumulation of information and technology dominance, we found that all these war fighting capabilities have mounted up in the last 3-4 decades, and it was during this time when the pace of our system’s decision-making process was at its lowest mark too.

To some extent, it is by influencing the ‘Neocortex’ of our decision-making process, that ‘others’ have leveraged the time and space.

But the entire effort behind AI is an attempt to build a replica of Human Intelligence (HI) and in this domain, Bharat possesses a natural edge, for ages!

Human Intelligence and Edge of Bharat

An interesting thing about HI is that is not stocked up in the air-conditioned data centers, consuming resources of the planet earth. It is dispersed in the billions of minds around us and if we speak in the language of science, the research says that a single Human Brain can store information and command connections roughly as many as the entire ‘internet,’ has more switches than all computers on earth and measuring its true size, is beyond the capacity of existing metrics of computer science domain!

Cognitive Science is gradually reaching the conclusion that every mind is unique, full of diversity, and has the mechanism to reach a ‘Superhuman intelligence’ level! But which country on the planet has a thousand of years old thought system that supports this view? And where it is said that a self-conscious ‘Mind’ (Nar) can attain the status of ‘Divinity’ itself (Narayan), it is within the reach of all of us!

Bharat is the only continuing ancient civilization that has explored, experienced, and experimented with the peak of HI when a larger part of the world was busy experimenting with animal psychology, ‘Survival’ rules, and the ‘law of the jungle’ kind of narrow pursuits. There is a reason why to date, the conceptual assets stored in our Mahabharata, Gita, Vedas, Puranas, and Upanishads, influence and inspire modern weaponry, combat science, and strategic thought processes!

“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege which this century may claim over all previous centuries,” said physicist and ‘father of the Atomic Bomb’ J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Who will take ownership of HI? Now we are entering into a phase, when there will not be just a battle of minds but the battle of intelligence, and largely it will be a battle between AI vs. HI. And in this battle of intelligence, every aspect of human intellect is a potent weapon and a lucrative target as well.

From Silicon Valley to the Vatican, AI has many guardians, preachers, and protectors but if there is one country that must protect and keep the edge of HI high, it is Bharat. It’s a domain that belongs to our ancestors and our true heritage!

AI-related warfighting capabilities deal with the ‘Perception,’ the sensory experience of the world, and they can be seen as the modern improvisations of a much larger offensive scheme called ‘Maya’ (illusion- a distortion of the senses itself).

Bharat has an identity of being the architect of ‘Maya’ and Mayavi Yudh and history tells us that we are not only the creator if the question of the survival of humanity comes; we are the destroyer of our creation too. We are a land, which can bless even a ‘Bhasmasur,’ (भस्मासुर) but when he misuses it, then we return in the form of ‘Mohini’ (मोहिनी) to cause him to turn himself into ashes!

Recommendations. What are the key hurdles?

It’s a war between AI vs. HI, and the more we will invest in our HI part, the more we will lead in the theoretical, conceptual, and imagination aspects of this domain, the better we will perform!

But the problem with the professionals of relevant security agencies is that there is a gigantic mountain of intellectual assets that exist in every aspect of AI and AI-related future warfare, from philosophy, psychology, and doctrines to tools, trends, technology, and digging such a vast mountain of knowledge asset, in parallel to dealing with routine and operational challenges of the profession, is not humanly possible!

Solution. A body of knowledge must exist whose primary job would be: observing every single pattern/ trend emerging in the domain of AI and AI-led information/ psychological and cognitive warfare, with an ‘Eagle Eye’ view, enhancing the capacity of ‘wetware’ of security agencies and weaponizing them with the latest knowledge on the domain, maintaining a separate information repository for future challenges, and promoting awareness among the common people (victim of such improvisations).

Formation of an independent working group, capable to weaponize our security agencies, theoretically and conceptually, in the domain of AI and Cognitive Warfare, is the need of the hour!  (Concluded).

READ ALSO: Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence (Part 1)

The post Philosophy of Weaponization of AI and India’s Approach (Part 2) appeared first on IMR.

Developments in Brain Science and Neuroscience are going in parallel with an intensification of Artificial Intelligence and Synapses, Neurons, Connectome, Cognitive structure, and the Whole Brain Approach kind of jargons are the new vocabulary of the computer industry.

There are many theories that exist on how the brain works and one such theory in Markram’s view is that the brain “builds” a version of the universe and projects this version, like a bubble, all around us. And the “decisions” are the key things that support our perceptual bubbles “without decisions, you cannot see, you cannot think, you cannot feel.” He further explained that “you think that anesthetics work by sending you into some kind of deep sleep or by blocking your receptors so that you don’t feel pain! But in fact, most anesthetics don’t work that way, what they do is that they introduce some noise into the brain, so that the neurons cannot understand each other, they are confused, and you cannot make a decision.” 

In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative – the Human Brain Project (a project to create an exact replica of the human brain) one billion euro grant, which finally ended up creating a digital simulation of the ‘mouse brain,’ but what does Henry really contributed to is that he ‘unintentionally’ summarized the functional model behind the idea of AI-enabled social media platforms. It seems that by accelerating the meter of ‘noise’ on the internet and social platforms, common people’s ability to make independent and free from biased decisions, even on very trivial looking matters related to personal, professional, and national security interests, is being crushed!

Now how long can we afford to stay under this state of ‘information anesthesia,’ and let the digital hypnotists test their experiments on us, that’s a question of personal and national inquiry! 

“We’re being hypnotized little by little, by technicians that we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now,” Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research (established VR as a field), author ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.’

Interesting developments from ‘Sentient’ to ‘Cult’ AI

“Are we about to witness a dystopian science movie come to life?” Such headlines are storming the internet since Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that his AI Chatbot, based on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and LLM (Large Language Models) components, suddenly turned ‘Sentient’ during a conversation on matters related to religion, consciousness, and personhood. Within hours of this news surfacing online, Google dismissed his claims, put him on paid leave (sort of suspension from work), citing a breach of confidentiality, and fueled the suspicions/mysteries further.

On 11 June, the priest-cum-software engineer Blake Lemoine published one of the transcripts of the conversations between him and his LaMDA scripted bot on his blog titled “Is LaMDA Sentient? — An Interview,” where his programme’s sense of perception and ability to express “thoughts and feelings,” and having a “soul” that cares for the world (similar to a human being) were highlighted.

Lemoine, who is also an occultist and a priest, recently tweeted that “I’m a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can’t put souls?”

Starting with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ‘Eliza Effect’ to Lemoine’s ‘Sentient’ AI, there is an interesting background and track record behind such efforts! So while one can have sympathy with Google engineer’s claims on ‘Sentient AI’ (after all Bhartiya culture sees life and soul in every particle around) but the question still is what’s the mystical formula behind this shift in Google’s hiring patterns? 

From engineers coding programs to psychologists/social behavior experts hacking human minds to ‘priests’ preaching values/ethics to algorithms, where the trajectory is really going? And more than being ‘Sentient,’ is AI gradually becoming a ‘Cult’ in itself?

Back in 2015, another multi-millionaire Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, founder Google’s Self-Driving Car programme, suddenly made an interesting move. He decided to open the first AI church ‘Way of the Future,’ and said: “Humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules,” in the same way if “in the future, something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge!”

So all he wanted is “a peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet” from humans to ‘whatever,’ and the idea was that in the future this ‘whatever’ (AI) will “hear everything, see everything, and be everywhere at all times,” so the only word to describe that ‘whatever’ is ‘God’ and the only way to influence a God is through “prayer and worship.” [As per the current status after donating the AI church’s entire fund to NAACP – a US civil rights group in 2020, Levandowski closed his AI church by 2021].

In parallel to all that, there is news that the Vatican is quite concerned about ethical/value aspects of AI too! For the last few years, Pope Francis is frequently meeting with the Silicon Valley Club, raising his concerns, urging the UN to take the lead, and some executives from IBM and Microsoft are signing the “Rome call for AI ethics” kind of pledge with the Vatican officials. 

“Let us pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind,” we could say, may it “be human,” Pope Francis, a message from Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network (November 2020).

The way things are moving, days are not far when we will see AI getting redefined as ‘Abrahamic Intelligence’.

So before that happens and missionaries of ‘AI God’ start their global voyage, the need for a country like us is to have a mountaintop view of the situation!

 The Idea of ‘Weaponization’ of AI

More than the weaponization of AI, it is our inability to see and track its emerging patterns, an unneeded hesitancy to recognize such threats, a lack of strategic timing, a slow-paced OODA loop of our decision-making process, and a lack of overall ‘Will’ to fight or retaliate, as a nation, that should be a matter of concern!

It is said that there is a time and space for the use of the weapon, but the case of Artificial Intelligence, the product of the ‘New Science’ of the World War phase, is a bit unique. On a broader level, it is going through its cycle of weaponization – commercialization and re-weaponization phase, something very similar to DARPA’s naming conventions (starting with ARPA, then becoming DAPRA, then ARPA, and then again DARPA kind of cycle) but at the level of conceptual and theoretical aspects of AI, a lot of creative improvisations that are going on in parallel.

In his Davos 2022 speech, George Soros said: “Today, China and Russia present the greatest threats to open society.” And the source of their growing abilities lies in his views “in the rapid development of digital technology, especially artificial intelligence.” And he further said: “AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies!”

It is amazing that in such kind of predictions about AI, a potential AI threat never emerges from Google’s Deep Mind lab or its Brain Team/Quantum AI kind of projects, nor Boston Dynamics’ weird experimentation labs, or Elon Musk’s Brain chip projects, and neither from DARPA’s $2 billion AI-Next Campaign and its unclassified projects. These are some of the places where the large-scale work on AI, robotics, and future war technologies, is going on for decades! So how should one look at all that?

Should that be seen as a part of some large-scale philanthropic mission to save the humanity? Of course not!

Weaponization of AI in the Russia-Ukraine War

Before the war, there was a lot of hype around Russia’s AI projects and there was a +threat to the future of civilization from that, now whether Russia used AI in the Ukraine operation or not, cannot be confirmed with any certainty, except for some hyped news headlines that are based on a 2019 press release on Kalashnikov Zala Aero’s AI visual identification capabilities for its unmanned aircraft and news around Zala KYB-UAV, but on the contrary, it is Ukraine which transformed this war into the first High Tech, Social Media and AI War of the Century!

In the middle of the Ukraine War, Clearview AI, an American face recognition company, entered the battlefield to help Ukrainian forces through its powerful AI tools, database and other capabilities, and their face recognition system proved a lethal weapon in the war against Russian forces. This Peter Thiel-backed startup, founded in 2017, is already quite controversial in its home country for the abuse of similar technology against common social media users. By mid-2021, there were headlines in the Western press on how this secretive company and its AI tools can end the idea of ‘privacy’ on the internet! But overnight it turned into a rock star and a game-changer, in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine War, where it helped Ukrainian forces with over 2 billion images, stolen from the Russian social media company – VKontakte, to wage attacks against Russian forces and now team Clearview AI is being celebrated for such heroic contributions in the War!

These days Clearview AI’s CEO Hoan Ton-That is giving interviews to the media that how “upsetting and devastating” it was to watch the images of women and children coming out from the battlefield and how that pushed him emotionally to do something as a company to help Ukrainians in the War. And Clearview AI is not the only US company that got emotionally or morally provoked to participate in the War, the whole Big Tech club got provoked, and the entire Silicon Valley got morally provoked too! And then there is news that how in the middle of the War, a conversation between two Russian soldiers got automatically captured, transcribed, translated, and analyzed using artificial intelligence algorithms, developed by another US company called Primer. Several unsecured Russian transmissions have been posted online, translated, and analyzed on the social media.

And this does not stop only here! Every single US tech platform and social networking site that not just Russians or Ukrainians but the entire globe is using to explore about the War, every single platform where people talk/share or present their views on the Russia-Ukraine crisis, have embedded advanced AI algorithms, that are recording these response/reactions and emotions in the real-time, so every single misuse, manipulation, influence and any sort of information operation using these capabilities, to influence the global perception in a War, also comes under the idea of ‘Weaponization’ of AI.

It’s not that Russia does not possess these capabilities, their military systems are also well equipped with advanced AI capabilities but it’s more about a tendency and entitlement to transform your War into some kind of a global moral crusade, as ‘Morality’ is contagious!

And this makes one more curious to explore what’s exactly is the philosophy behind the Weaponization of AI?

READ ALSO: Philosophy of Weaponization of AI and India’s Approach (Part 2)

The post Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence (Part 1) appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Part 1: Psyche Behind the Internet, Information Superhighways

MaaS (Misinformation as a Service) Model

The era of SaaS (Software as a Service) has gone, no one needs software developers and service providers anymore. Those routine old jobs could soon be performed by OpenAI’s GPT-3. Common people’s potential in a democracy needs to leverage for something more interesting, passionate and creative, such as Misinformation or Disinformation campaigns and propaganda wars! Perhaps, that was the idea behind the rise of this new service model called MaaS (Misinformation as a Service), which is often called with better-sounding names like creators economy, curators economy, influencers economy/ marketing, social media activism/ journalism, creative entrepreneurship, etc.

Out of 5 billion Internet users in the world (63.5 percent of the global population), 4.65 billion are social media users, and China, India, and the U.S. top the list of the countries in the world in terms of Internet use. In March 2022, YouTube India flooded Indian/ international newspapers with some interesting advertising stats about its ‘contribution’ to India’s economy and GDP via ‘creator economy.’ A report by consulting firm Oxford Economics, which assessed YouTube’s economic, societal, and cultural impact in India, says that “YouTube’s creator ecosystem has contributed an estimated Rs 6,800 crore to the Indian economy and created some 6,83,900 full-time equivalent jobs in India” in 2020. The statistics say that there are 40,000 plus YouTube channels in India with over 1 lakh subscribers, marking a growth of over 45 percent, year-on-year. Remember, these are the claims of only one social media platform; others like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. have their own numbers, patterns, and claims about contribution to the Indian economy, society, and culture!

If such claims are real then we must be interested to know who delivers MaaS (Misinformation as a Service) to our people on these platforms or, in other words, who performs the stunts on public participation/opinion on Information Superhighways?

Influencers, Creative Entrepreneurs, and Skillful Artists – A brief psychoanalysis of the situation

“The power of false narratives can be very debilitating for the destiny of a nation,” said NSA Ajit Doval in the ‘Sardar Patel Memorial Speech 2018.’ Highlighting the role of technologies in serving contaminated content to our people, he further said that “Democracy requires people to be enlightened, educated and informed, but rightly informed and rightly educated! What happens if what is driving you and what is influencing your decision-making itself is contaminated?”

India, one of the most online countries in the world and home to over 750 million smartphone users, must know who is driving the public participation on these platforms, and what the overall process looks like, from a mountaintop view!

Technically there are different categories of influencers on the Internet, from mainstream celebrities (A-B-C listers) to reality TV stars to vloggers/ bloggers to micro and nano influencers to journalists/ activists/ photographers/ thought leaders, etc. But those who reach the potential to influence the ‘will’ of the nation, and channel public opinion as a weapon, generally fall under the two broad categories:

(a)  Creative Entrepreneurs

(b)  Skillful Artists.

Creative Entrepreneur is relatively a new term introduced by these very platforms, which is their definition for those creators who have a good number of subscribers/ viewership/ followers. They earn income directly from these platforms, and hire paid employees to work on their channel.

In the Skillful Artists category, we can put those people who got some form of skill or talent than average people and who like to pursue that skill as a profession too.

There is a common notion that just anyone can become an ‘Influencer’ or celebrity on these platforms but a careful observation of their selected individuals and their patterns reveals that this is nothing but an illusion. There is a systematic pattern of hunting for influencers on these platforms, designed by using psychology, sociology, anthropology (holism), and human behavior-related experiments.

The selected creative people usually go through a rigorous and psychological method of selection/ recruitment and development.

Process of Selection/ Recruitment and Development

There is an underlying three-stage process, designed to control and mobilize the creative and artistic people, for the purpose. It is not that this process is the invention of these platforms, it was there for ages in human societies and it applies to other industries/ domains of power and fame, too. The social media platforms are only using it more skillfully!

In the First Stage, which is a preliminary stage, everyone is allowed to enter and showcase their talent on these platforms, like an open and live audition. Here, the selected few start earning some money too, as the goal at this stage is to make people addicted to this extra and convenient source of income and to use them for word-of-mouth marketing.

After spending some time in this stage, these creators become addicted to this extra income, and easy publicity, and then they try hard to figure out what will promote them to the next stage – the stage of real fame and more income, unaware of the fact that they all are being monitored very delicately by Big Brothers of these platforms.

In the Second Stage, these platforms hunt for those people, who are fully dedicated and addicted to their skills, talent and platforms and ready to perform any kind of stunt/ adventure on just an order! They are very much like the biker gangs or outlaw motorcycle clubs of the 1990s and 2000s, which used to perform motorcycle stunts on the roads and were known for carrying the ideas of freedom, nonconformity to mainstream culture, and loyalty to the biker group, etc.

This stage is a bit tough. Those who reach here are a bit more famous than those in the first stage but at the same time, since they have talent and free spirit, they are tough to command too!

So here they go through a psychological experiment, where, first their morale is crushed, then their confidence is broken and finally, they are made to believe that their skill/ talent is of no worth! Whatever they have earned in life is due to the mercy of these platforms/ providers and gradually they start seeing these platforms in the image of a ‘God.’ This is a stage of absolute ‘devotion,’ but devotion to whom? Not to the talent or karma, but to the platforms and the forces behind them!

Those who belong to this stage usually have a typical story: ‘I was doing something like a normal person, and one day changed my life entirely!’ They are famous but not ultra-famous (sometimes they are called ‘in-betweeners’ of the Internet, too). They are making good money but they know that a step ahead, the sky is the limit! Those who sustained such a mental status for sometime are carefully monitored for the next stage.

The Third Stage is the final stage, and only a selected few can reach here, after crossing the rigorous psychological experiments in the first and second stages successfully. This is a stage, where we see influencers performing weird stuff, something unusual and alien to the society, culture, and norms/ structure of their targeted region. These people are in the process of becoming ‘cult’ celebrities and have started enjoying the hypnotic addiction of their status.

In one form or the other, the ‘cult’ celebrities were always there, even before the Internet, social media, and smartphones, and we have seen them in different professions/ domains, too, i.e., show business, politics, sports, journalism, activism, and socio-religious domains. But what has changed now is that AI-enabled social media platforms have expanded their impact multifold, and performing cognitive manoeuvres/ psychological warfare for political/ economic/ strategic goals through these mercenaries, at the click of a mouse!

One more thing that is common in these Influencers is that they are artists by character, and an artist is generally a rebel from the inside, and standing against the established norms of the society/system gives them artistic satisfaction!

Now imagine if a battalion of such influencers, Creative Entrepreneurs, Skillful Artists, and cult celebrities, is tasked to march with full force, to wage a battle of false narratives/ misinformation/ disinformation against a country’s interests, decisions, culture, ethos, and structure!

What can be the approach to deal with such a situation?

Sever the Roots – Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy

It is said that a grand strategy to deal with a problem must include a way to think hard, dig deep, reach out to roots, and severing them, to end the problem with finality. And there should always exist the 10th man in the room too!

To visualize a solution in this scenario we will need to go back to the origin, the roots of internet again!

The idea of “Information Superhighways” was proposed with an analogy to physical highways, and its propagator former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said: “The Global Information Infrastructure will help educate our children and allow us to exchange ideas within a community and among nations. It will be a means by which families and friends will transcend the barriers of time and distance. It will make possible a global information marketplace, where consumers can buy or sell products.”

We build physical highways for the similar kind of purpose, that is ‘smooth travel’ for everyone – from people on foot to horses to bicycles to motor cars to commercial and heavy transport vehicles. Sometimes these highways are exploited by bad elements too, i.e., biker gangs, rioters, protesters, terrorists, anti-national elements, etc., but at the same time ensuring a smooth and safe journey for all is the responsibility of the government.

We have a time-tested road safety framework to deal with the challenges of traffic collisions, deaths, injuries, property damage, and other harms on the highway system. Some inputs/ experiences to managing physical highways can be applied to frame a roadmap for the safety and security of Information Superhighways, too.

Time for ‘Traffic Rules’

“Don’t mistake the democracy for the ballot box! The ballot box is a mechanism to find out who will make the laws for you, and what will be the laws of this country. It is not democracy by itself. The democracy is that the laws which are made by the representatives of the people, will be adhered by all the people, and will be enforced with the total strength of the might of the state,” said NSA Ajit Doval.

If the Internet is the global ‘Information Superhighway,’ then Misinformation/ Disinformation can be called the adventure/ misadventure and stunts on these highways. To control such chaos on physical highways we have the concept of Traffic Rules, Traffic Inspectors, and a well-crafted Traffic Management System, too. If anyone violates the traffic rules, then there are different provisions to deal with that like issuing the ‘challan’ to traffic rule violators, and suspension/ cancellation of their driving licence.

Some traffic rules for I-ways can be prepared by deriving inputs from this conventional approach!

A broader outline for ‘Traffic Rules’

Apart from the categories of influencers mentioned above and sponsored accounts, some common people like urban/ semi-urban and rural youth, housewives, professionals, and teenagers, also indulge in contributing to Misinformation/ Disinformation, for different reasons, i.e., entertainment/ fun, source of easy and extra income, ideological alignment, unemployment/ poverty and human behavior related aspects. And our response to deal with such cases generally falls under three broad categories: Suspension/ ban of social media accounts, enforcement of criminal charges and arrest (if a case is registered), or temporary Internet shutdown (in case of riots, mass level violence or terrorist act). But in each of these possible responses, there is always a scope for escape and special privilege, under the banner of ‘Freedom of Speech.’

Every social media post/ short/ tweet that spreads misinformation/ disinformation is paid! So, there is the need is to keep the freedom of expression intact but restrain the freedoms of earning from that expression.

How? Today every social media account is connected to a mobile, every mobile is connected to Aadhaar card, and Aadhaar card is connected to the bank account. With the help of technology and connected structure, a system can be developed, where on reporting a misinformation/ disinformation case, the bank account/ financial transactions of the originator of misinformation can be ‘frozen,’ on the click of a mouse, with immediate effect!

Now, this ‘freezing’ process can be very much similar to the process of revoking the driving licence and issuing ‘challan’ on highways, where once caught the violators are forced to go through an exhaustive legal or bureaucratic process. And that lesson becomes the lesson for a lifetime! Those whose bank accounts are frozen/ suspended will be needed to prove their cause and justify the act. If they are able to do so, their bank accounts/ financial transactions can be resumed, if not, then the long, legal and official process follows.

Only by testing such a framework in a handful of sample cases, we can minimize the violations of traffic rules on Information Superhighway to a great extent!

Conclusion

“There is always a possibility of false narratives derailing the democracy. Today it has expanded manifold because of the technology. And it becomes the responsibility of everyone, every citizen, everyone in the media, everyone who speaks, every institution, every gathering that you go to, that erode the strength of the false narrative” – National Security Advisor Shri Ajit Doval (Sardar Patel Memorial Speech, 2018).

Everything that we count as a strength of our society, culture and civilization, is our key vulnerability, too! In the coming days, attacks on the trust and will of the common people through false narratives, are only going to accelerate. So, accelerating the creative improvisations to fight them is our collective responsibility, too!

A technology that was born in the middle of a war, by the people involved in the war, to shape the outcomes of the war, and to attack the mind of enemies in the war, discussing its weaponization, is a bit naïve, and late. What best we can do now is to prepare the mind to deal with its challenges, with the same war-like spirit!

ALSO READ: Part 1: Psyche Behind the Internet, Information Superhighways

The post Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy for India appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Part 2: Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy,

“War is not an act of the will aimed at the inanimate matter, as it is in the mechanical arts…. Rather, it is an act of the will aimed at a living entity that reacts,” Prussian general and military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831).

A US tech tycoon bids ($44 billion) for a social networking platform, with a claim to protect ‘free speech’ and the function of ‘democracy’ and millions became his followers overnight, including many countries like India, ignorant of the fact that his idea of ‘democracy’ was more aligned with the ‘Referendum’ mindset of separatist and pro-Khalistani elements.

Musk has some other interesting concerns and creative solutions for the future of humanity, too (which rarely make headlines in India), such as helping humans to become ‘multi-planet species’ and implanting a ‘fit bit’ in their skulls to prepare them to fight against their ‘extinction’ from the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).

In April 2021, Musk’s Neuralink Corporation released a video in which a monkey was playing the video game MindPong via the Bluetooth-enabled chips inserted into his brain. The video was shared widely and propagated as a landmark step toward merging human consciousness with AI. By December 2021, Musk announced his plans to start testing his chip with the humans too. As of Feb 2022, there were reports that those tests killed 15 out of 23 monkeys, including the one that played the video game, due to ‘extreme suffering.’

Musk, the savior of humanity, also used his Starlink Internet as a weapon against Russian forces in the Ukraine War, and when told to be held accountable for his actions as an “adult” by the Russian Space chief, he immediately started playing “If I die under mysterious circumstances,” kind of tweets, which stormed the social platforms.

Such is the character of 21st-Century Cognitive Warfare! It is no more some covert or indirect operation, where Maskirovka has any role to play. It is a live stream stunt of 280 characters or 60 seconds shorts that hit directly and precisely to its targets and trigger their dopamine release, in other words, makes them ‘feel good about being targeted!

Background to psyche behind the ‘Internet’

Roscosmos (Space Corporation of Russia) chief Dmitry Rogozin stated that Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals “were delivered to the militants of the Nazi Azov Battalion and the Ukrainian Marines in Mariupol by military helicopters,” and Musk is, thus, involved in “supplying the fascist forces in Ukraine with military communication equipment.” The use of Starlink’s Internet terminals as a weapon in the Ukraine War and a recent verbal exchange between Musk and Rogozin refreshed the memories of the Internet’s background in people’s minds.

On 4 October 1957, Soviet Union inaugurated the ‘Space Age’ with the launch of Sputnik 1 – the first artificial satellite of the world. There are enough documents that suggest that the launch of Sputnik created a big political and moral chaos in the USA and the American society’s reaction (military, government, and public combined) to the Sputnik launch is considered an important juncture in America’s history.

Circling the globe every one hour and 35 minutes, Sputnik was traveling on the north to the south orbital path that brought it over the USA, seven times every twenty-four hours, and its steady “beep beep” sound thrilled and terrified the listeners. The popular term ‘Sputnik Moment’ signifies exactly that. It is said that in many senses, Sputnik hysteria sparked the creation of the Internet.

On 7 February 1958, five months after the Sputnik crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA was established to catch up with the Soviets in the space race and to lead in three key areas of research: Space technology, ballistic missile defence (BMD), and solid propellants, but very soon (by the early 1960s) it started venturing into the new research areas, including command and control.

There is no doubt that it was the urgency of war (both limited and nuclear) that led ARPA to develop a technology that Rogozin aptly referred to as ‘military communication systems,’ but when we trace the history of the Internet and its different stages of development, from Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider’s “Intergalactic Network” memo in 1963 to Al Gore’s “Information Superhighways” speech in 1994, the first question that comes to mind is what motivated the Pentagon to hire experimental psychologists like Licklider to develop the technology?

There are several historical documents like Charles Bray’s paper “Toward a Technology of Human Behavior for Defence Use” published in 1962 and Ellen Herman’s book “The Romance of American Psychology” (1995) that suggest that throughout the Cold War phase, exploring the ‘Psychology’ and human behavior aspects, was one of the key interest areas of the US military experts. Highlighting some numbers in her book, Ellen writes that “Between 1940 and 1970, the number of psychologists and psychiatrists climbed astronomically,” and “membership in American Psychological Association grew by more than 1,100 per cent, from 2,739 in 1940 to 30,839 in 1970.” She noted that “psychological experts’ rise to power was due initially to the benefits of war, World War at first and then Cold War” and “military imperatives during World War II, provided psychological experts with their first encounter with the policymakers.”

It was during this period and in this background, that the idea of the Internet was developed and Licklider and other experimental psychologist professionals contributed to its design, not to promote the ideas of liberty, democracy, equality, one world, innovation, and freedom of speech kind of fancy ideas but for the objectives of the ‘War’ and to win the ‘battles of the mind.’ Their focus was to provide solutions to loosely defined military problems from the broadest possible perspective. That generation was tasked with waging the psychological warfare, ‘man-machine’ engineering problems, experimenting with the ‘sensation and perception’ aspects and exploring the mysteries of human motivation, attitudes, and behavior.

So, this idea that wars could be won by advancing weapon technologies and killing one’s opponents was repeatedly identified as naïve and incorrect!

While on one hand, these sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and psychologists of the Pentagon tried harder to be seen as ‘scientific,’ as possible, on the other hand, they reached the conclusion that there could be no higher military priority than the “control of human subjectivity.”

It is a bit hard to imagine that if these experts from the Pentagon would have pitched their products/ ideas directly to the third countries, with a promise to help in their economic progress, children’s education, knowledge/ information sharing, and to make their democracies strong, given the track record of such claims, which country on earth would have accepted that deal!

So for Licklider’s “intergalactic network” vision to be fulfilled, the private sector’s financial support, a pinch of humanitarian approach, some democratic jargon, and the narration industry’s backing were needed, and from here the idea of “Information Superhighways” was born.

Information Superhighways

In his famous (March 21, 1994) “Information Superhighways” speech, Al Gore, the 45th Vice President of the USA said: “This GII (Global Information Infrastructure) will circle the globe with information superhighways on which all people can travel. These highways or, more accurately, networks of distributed intelligence will allow us to share information, to connect, and to communicate as a global community.” It was Al Gore who promoted the legislation that funded an expansion of ARPANET and lobbied aggressively in favor of privatization and globalization of the Internet. Gore is currently a member of Apple’s board of directors and a senior partner at venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins (the firm which has been an early investor in more than 900 high tech/social media companies in the US, including Amazon, Google, and Twitter).

In April 1994, Netscape Communications Corporation was born, and Microsoft created a web browser for Windows 95. In the same year, Amazon.com was launched as an online marketplace for books. In 1995, Yahoo was incorporated and a search engine function Yahoo search was introduced. Then came the era of Netflix (1997), Google (1998), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006).

Internet witnessed a phenomenal expansion in its new avatar, from only 16 million users in 1995 to 5 billion users (63% of the world population) in 2022. It is interesting that in their earlier pitch for Information Superhighways, Al Gore and Clinton both projected the idea as an educational tool, virtual library of the future, knowledge/ information exchange utility and virtual research facility, etc., designed to harvest local and global knowledge economy and innovation culture. But we have seen in a very short period of time, that things shifted to dating, entertainment, shopping, live streaming, social experiments, activism, psychological, and political campaigns!

“The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.” mathematician Norbert Wiener, ‘The Human Use of Human Beings (1950).

Convenience of driving “Mass Surveillance”

In 2013, an American intelligence contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the secret wide-ranging information-gathering programmes conducted by National Security Agency (U.S. intelligence agency), and the stories of those leaks were published in The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. In the article “NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others,” published in The Guardian, (7 June 2013), it was highlighted how the NSA has obtained “direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, and other US internet giants.” It revealed that “some of the world’s largest Internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing programme (code name PRISM) since its introduction in 2007.” The article says that Microsoft was the first, with a collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and, finally, Apple, which joined the programme in 2012. And “collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.”

In 2014, while interacting with Edward Snowden virtually on a Russian TV show, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is not carrying out mass surveillance programmes of the kind Snowden exposed in the USA, and “we don’t have as much money as they do in the US,” he added sarcastically. A few days later, while speaking at a media forum in St. Petersburg Putin said that the Internet was originally created as a ‘CIA project’ and “it is still developing as such.”

LifeLog Project – DARPA

In 1972, ARPA gained the ‘Defense’ prefix and was renamed DARPA, but in 1993 it reverted to its original name ARPA (as this acronym suits more to commercial applications), and finally three years later, in 1996, again renamed as ‘DARPA,’ to re-emphasize agency’s original focus. In 2002, DARPA launched the Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) programme, a cognitive system to “make military decision-making more efficient and more effective at multiple levels of command.” (This research led to the launch of Siri Inc in 2007, which, three years later, was acquired by the Apple).

In mid-2003 something more interesting happened. DARPA launched an ambitious project called LifeLog, which officially was aimed at recording essentially all of a person’s movements and conversations and everything that they listened to, watched, read and bought. The idea was to create a permanent, searchable, electronic diary of the entire lives, of the entire population of the planet. LifeLog was a bit ahead of its time, it was tasked to perform everything that smartphones, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, and other apps do these days! The idea was to trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life in terms of events/ states/ relationships, deducing behavioral patterns from monitoring people’s daily activities, and to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.

It cannot be a mere coincidence but it is said that the exact date (3 February 2004) on which Facebook was launched, Pentagon revoked its LifeLog project!

The real log of DARPA’s fascinating research is a bit long! But the question is – after developing dozens of interesting commercial tools, where does DARPA is focusing its energy these days?

‘AI-Next’ Campaign

In September 2018, DARPA launched a multi-year investment of more than $2 billion (in new and existing programmes) called the “AI Next” campaign. According to its official statement: “AI Next builds on DARPA’s five decades of AI technology creation to define and to shape the future, always with the Department’s hardest problems in mind.” DARPA is investing in the third wave of AI to develop machines that “understand and reason in context.” In Feb-March 2019, the agency started exploring ways to improve how AI systems like Siri/ Alexa teach themselves language and the Competency-Aware Machine Learning programme too. In a nutshell, the approach is quite simple, as they often say – “the best way to avoid surprises is to create surprises.”

Stunts on ‘Information Superhighways’

“War is never merely about victory on the battlefield or the simple conquest of land; it is about the pursuit of a policy that cannot be realized in any other way than through force.” Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

There are three important elements of the idea of “Information Superhighways”: Investment, Infrastructure, and Public Participation. While the first two are in absolute control of their makers, it is the third one, which belongs to us, the rest of the world that is traveling on these highways. Without ‘Public Participation,’ a highway is of no use, be it physical or virtual and it is this third and most crucial element of Information Superhighways, which is a matter of concern for democracies around the world, too.

Misinformation/Disinformation

Misinformation/ Disinformation is one of the most popular global concerns of our time. From Musk to Obama to Kissinger to white-haired architects of Information Superhighways, a flood of ‘free speech absolutists’ and guardians of ‘democracy’ is emerging in the Western world and it seems that almost every important person on earth is nowadays issuing a ‘wake-up call’ for democracy/ humanity and fighting the battle for a ‘safer’ Internet!

“People are dying because of misinformation,” said former US president Barack Obama in a recent speech. While the EU has passed Digital Services/ Digital Market Acts, the USA is forming the “Disinformation Governance Board,” too, but despite such enormous human efforts/ concerns the information superhighway, on the contrary, is becoming more and more chaotic, unsafe, and disordered with time.

With a similar kind of urgency the world was debating terrorism and counter-terrorism, until a few years ago, it is now discussing the issues of Misinformation and Disinformation. It is important to note that global forums like the UN are yet to develop a common consensus on the definition of ‘Terrorism,’ so devising an effective strategy is a far cry.

“You cannot defeat the enemy you can’t define,” often says national security adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval. Similar to the issue of terrorism, what is missing in all these global deliberations/ campaigns against Misinformation/ Disinformation is the affirmation of the basic fact that on the matters related to social, economical, religious, regional, and national consequences, spreading misinformation/ disinformation is a crime, cause of crime or a motive of the crime, and it needs to be tackled that way.

Misinformation is not a simple ‘spam,’ content that can be laughed at or ignored. In the case of India, we have seen how under the broader flag of ‘Misinformation/ Disinformation’ there are dedicated channels/ actors who promote anti-national/ anti-system and anti-establishment sentiments, and create social divide in the name of caste, community, regionalism, language identities, etc. We have seen how from abrogation of Article 370 Act to Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to Farms Laws, and even for those future bills/ moves that are yet to be drafted by the government like National Register of Citizens (NRC), a mass level damage to people and property was done, across the country, within a matter of few minutes of misinformation spread.

Last year, the number of imposed Internet shutdowns crossed over 106 in India. A few days back in May 2022, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) banned some 16 YouTube channels (under the IT Rules) for spreading misinformation on India’s national security and foreign relations matters, stirring communal discord and disturbing the law and order situation in the country. In April, MIB banned over 22 YouTube channels, and a number of similar actions were taken in the past. These channels/social media accounts usually hold millions of subscriptions/ followers and, by the time the ban is initiated, the damage is already done. A ban cannot automatically trigger a ‘delete all’ command on millions of devices where such content is already copied/downloaded. Misinformation/ disinformation spread on social media sometimes transitions to much larger audiences when picked up by traditional media – print or electronic too!

A new study by MIT scholars on Misinformation, published in 2018, found that on social media “falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude.” Many such types of research are being conducted on the issues of Misinformation and Disinformation, and they often talk about things like novelty hypothesis, transmission chain, Machiavellian intelligence/ Social Brain, laws of human nature, etc., but interestingly, none of these researches ever attempt to reach the root of the problem!

“Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

If Al Gore’s ‘Information Superhighways’ analogy was right then social media platforms/ apps can be seen as the vehicles on those highways and misinformation/ disinformation as the fuel that runs those vehicles (after all, these companies make enormous profit out of misinformation/ disinformation). But then the question comes – who is sitting on the driver’s seat and who is performing stunts on the information highways?

ALSO READ: Part 2: Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy

The post Psyche Behind the Internet,Information Superhighways appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 1)

How did that approach work in Russia-Ukraine War?

“When people speak in vague generalities, for example, and use a lot of abstract terms like justice, morality, liberty, and so on, without really ever explaining the specifics of what they are talking about, they are almost always hiding something. This is often their own nasty but necessary actions, which they prefer to cover up under a screen of righteous verbiage. When you hear such talk, be suspicious,” Writes Robert Greene in “The 33 Strategies of War.”

From the beginning, the Ukraine war is a crusade for liberty/ free will and some kind of global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism for media. Global media is flooded with stories that Ukraine is such a model for democracy in the region that its mere existence makes Putin uncomfortable, and that is why he launched a brutal attack on civilian centers. In his remark on 26th March, US President Joe Biden said: “we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”

Such narratives needed a great narrator too. Zelenskyy’s entertainment and media background combined with live-streamed propaganda (streaming 24/7 to every corner of the globe), and Russia’s complete isolation from the internet, provided NATO a cognitive weapon for which Putin had no counter. From press to social media to parliaments to diplomatic enclaves to Grammy to Oscar, the one-sided celebration of Ukraine’s heroic resistance and Zelenskyy’s Netflix-like leadership approach virtually declared Ukraine a winner in this war, no matter what may be the outcomes.

In the early hours of 24 February, shortly before the start of the war, Zelenskyy recorded an address to the citizens of both Ukraine and Russia, in which he said: “Who can prevent this (war)? People – are these people present among you? I am sure there are – public figures, journalists, musicians, actors, athletes, scientists, doctors, bloggers, stand-up comedians, Tik-Tokers, and many more – regular people.”

The overall western narrative on Ukraine and Zelensky’s position can be summed up in the lines from a recent article “Glory to You, President Zelenskyy,” published in Harvard Political Review (March 3, 2022): “Tens of millions of people worldwide have seen President Zelenskyy’s videos shared online and on television. He has harnessed the power of social media to become history’s first truly online wartime leader, bypassing traditional gatekeepers as he uses the internet to reach out to the people. His uncensored, unadulterated spirit shines through in each broadcast” and Zelenskyy, “through his tactful use of social media, has rallied the world to the cause of Ukraine.”

In the information war, the winner is unquestionably Zelenskyy but it is important to note that information is not the only front in this War!

Now the big question among the Western strategist is – how long can we keep the short-attention-span internet audience (particularly the Americans) interested and engaged in Ukraine’s real-time war series?

Weaponization of AI – A Trailer

It is not that Russia was not aware of the growing Western might on the technology front. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement on AI made the headlines, when he said: “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind, it comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict.” And “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” Russia’s military systems are also well equipped with advanced AI capabilities including AI-enabled robotic weapons, autonomous tanks, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), long-range strikes involving high-precision missiles, and the Russian military already use AI for intelligence gathering, C4ISR, logistics, and development of autonomous weapons.

But backed by U.S. and NATO support, Ukraine has a clear edge over AI and digital technology, particularly in the psychological and cognitive warfare domains.

Last month, in the middle of the war, a conversation between two Russian soldiers got automatically captured, transcribed, translated, and analyzed using artificial intelligence algorithms (developed by a US company called Primer). There is news that several unsecured Russian transmissions have been posted online, translated, and analyzed on social media. It is also important to note that every single tech platform and social networking site that, not just Russians or Ukrainians, but the entire globe is using to explore the War, every single platform where people talk/ share or present their views on the Russia-Ukraine crisis, have embedded advanced AI algorithms, that are recording our response/ reactions and emotions in real-time in this big laboratory of psychological experiments called the Internet.

So in a way technology has made everyone a participant (with or without our consent) in this war and from that point of view, it is indeed a kind of virtual WW III. But given the possibilities of AI weaponization in the future, it can still be called only a trailer or snapshot of the future!

From an outer view, the latest developments in Cognitive Warfare and associated psychological manoeuvres appear as matters of the Big Power game, where countries like India have some scope to remain ‘untouched’ and ‘neutral’ but the question is – Can we afford to ignore the fact that in this battle of public perception, every single user, irrespective of his/ her national/ cultural identity, knowingly or unknowingly is a potential team member of some regional/ national or global battalion, recruited to serve the interests of forces, outside our borders?

India’s National Security Concerns

Recently, India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval remarked about these new trends/ shifts in approach to warfare and their possible impact on India, when he said, “The civil society is the new frontier of warfare,” and it is “the common people, their thinking, their perceptions, their sense of well being, and their perception of their own governments,” and everything that can impact the “will of the nation,” is under attack, in this new age of information revolution.

These tech platforms which made their way into the Indian market in the name of some educational activities (Amazon as an online book store), some aid in research (Google search), and occasional entertainment activities (YouTube), now become not only the source of radicalization of a large section of youth but also a significant facilitator in illicit trade and anti-national activities. Today, we have reached a situation where, whether it is some engineering graduate living in a metro city or some rural youth indulging in farming in his village, the cognitive weapons of the information revolution are capable of affecting everyone’s “wetware” irrespective of their personal/ educational/ social or professional background.

When we trace the root of the problem, we find that it all began not with computer technology and the Internet but with “Reality TV” culture, the initial platforms of psychological experiments, and what we are observing now is largely a scaling up of that culture through a more precise and targeted information weapon in our hands – the smartphone and its 24/7 streaming apps.

From Reality TV to Live Streaming

Similar to computers, Reality TV made its debut in India in the name of some singing, dancing and adventure sports/ activities, and through their auditions among the youth, they developed a mass appeal. The craft was fairly simple – putting some people under complex psychological situations and collecting the reaction of the different groups and societies, via voting lines (dial-in mobile phones or SMS). That was the beginning of an active mass engagement and an implementation of the “Persuade, Influence and Change,” frame of traditional PsyOps.

Now, these experiments are entering a new phase. The technological developments in the last few decades have accelerated the pace and reach of such entertainment products to a different level. This phase marked the full exploitation of advancement not only in the digital technology domain alone, the other complementary fields such as Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology have undergone significant progress too. It is important to note that due to absolute presence and unhindered access for over two decades, now makers of these platforms have a rich experience in analyzing the message and communication exchanged between different groups of our society too, across all regions/ cultures and age groups. Our actions, reactions, emotions, behavior, choices, likes/ dislikes, and overall psychology is nothing but bit-sized information stored in their massive data servers! As a result, their tone, flavor and craft of experiment are consistently improving and getting more precise with each passing day.

Alignment with the Youth ‘Psych’

These days YouTube is circulating and advertisement that their growing creator ecosystem contributed Rs 6,800 crore to the Indian GDP and supported 683,900 full-time equivalent jobs in India in 2020. What does that mean in simple terms?

Entertainment, gaming, dancing, music, cooking, travel, comedy, pet care, home care, self-care, talking or any other hobby or routine, is no more some leisure activity. These are the new employment opportunities for the youth and a highly rewarding career too.

Indian society is inherently outcome-oriented. When a child spends more than usual hours on something, the parent usually asks  – what’s the return? By keeping this psyche of youth and society in mind, these platforms have revamped their strategy too. Today, the more a youth spends time on social media, the more he/ she is capable to earn followers/ likes/ shares/ impressions, higher the chance of his success in life (this is what they highlighted). And when they see around, what do they find? There are several success stories, that originated from a common source! There are several influencers-cum-celebrities out there who not only have a highly rewarding career/ income on social networks but a post-retirement plan too. Several such faces can now even be seen in our regional/ national politics. And if these local examples are not sufficient then search globally – these platforms have created several success cases, for each region/ race/ color/ culture on the planet (at this moment, Zelenskyy is one such face too). On a broader level, all that makes traditional career/ education/ innovation/ discovery/ research/ engineering kind of path appear as a less attractive and less rewarding option for the young minds!

This is the psyche of our Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which are born and nurtured in this environment!

Conclusion

“Elevate yourself through the power of your mind, and not degrade yourself, for the mind can be the friend and also the enemy of the self.” (The Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, Verse 5).

From perception to change to influence to command, computer technologies’ improvisations are now entering a state for which we have a reference in our ancient texts. In Ram-Ravan Yuddh, it is said that there came a moment when Ravan invoked “Maya” (the weapon of illusion), the weapon created an illusion of reviving all the armies and their leaders already killed in the war. Then Ram was reminded by his charioteer Matali that: “In your original identity, you are the creator of illusions in this universe. Ravan has created the illusion of phantoms to confuse you. If you make up your mind, you can dispel them immediately.” It is said that then Ram invoked the weapon called “Gyaana” (wisdom) and soon the entire illusion of terrifying armies created by Ravan evaporated into the thin air.

To deal with the Cognitive Warfare’s new improvisations, India’s ancient wisdom and thousands of years of experiences of experimenting with human intelligence can show a path! If name/ fame/ greed is the focus of the approach of Western model, then ‘Tyag and Tapasya’ is a time-tested approach of Bharat. It is this approach of our great rishi munis (who were the world’s leading inventors/ explorers and scientists) which made us thrive in several human endeavours in the past!

Bharat can develop a unique counter-Cognitive Warfare doctrine of its own and a time to work in that direction has come!

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 1)

The post Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 2) appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 2)

Misinformation, Propaganda, Narratives, Info War, Psy Ops and other non-kinetic tactics of World War II and Cold War phase, are rapidly getting replaced by tools of the 21st Century, that are more concise, precise, targeted, and at the same time largely ‘extremist’ in their approach. These are designed keeping the continuously reducing attention span of targeted viewers and the needs of hyper-empowered ‘homo digitalis’ in mind.

In the classic war strategies, it is often said that the best deceptions are based on ambiguity, mixing fact and fiction so that one cannot be disentangled from the other. In all the previous forms of psychological operations, whether leaflets, loudspeakers, radio, print and electronic propaganda, the truth remained an important ingredient of use and the key idea was that for manipulation to be effective, it had to be based (to a maximum extent) on some Truth and Credibility, otherwise it would not work in the long run. But all that is now a thing of the past. Those strategies belong to a phase when deceptions or manipulation operations used to be some irregular events, not a 24/7 live-streamed reality! In the world of bite-sized content and streaming communications, the philosophical concepts of ‘Art of War’ have mostly been replaced by psychologically fascinating ‘Art of Lying’ and the ideas of fact, logic, truth and credibility are gradually becoming obsolete and ineffectual.

So how the future recipe of psychological experiments will taste with these new ingredients? Russia-Ukraine War offers a perfect snapshot of that future!

After over 40 days of stunning speeches and standing ovations, massive cheerleading campaigns, TikTok manoeuvres, Instagram/ Twitter/ YouTube revolutions and all-out internet invasion, some horrific images of Ukrainian civilian causalities started coming out to the surface, and the world heard the “silence of ruined cities and killed people,” as Zelenskyy rightly quoted in his Grammy award message. These images do not go well with the much celebrated “heroic victory” of the Ukrainian President, yet he shared them with the global audience with some kind of ‘guarantee’ that neither the blame nor the accountability for this whole episode would ever come to his shoulders!

After all, it is Russia, the aggressor who committed these “war crimes.” NATO partners who betrayed the Ukrainians and the rest of the world, which is unable to decide whom to side with, is further making it worse! So where is the fault of Zelenskyy in all this? He is only doing the job that best suits him, carrying the image of “servant leader” (that elected him to chair) managing public opinion/ perceptions, and giving perfect shots for this live-streamed war series, in real-time! But how do those millions of Ukrainians who turned ‘refugees’ overnight and those who lost their families and dear ones in this nonsensical campaign for “NATO membership” see all this? How they perceive the role of their social media hero President whom they elected to end the war not to accelerate it, perhaps, will never come to the light!

“Ukraine has gone from bread basket to bread line,” said UN World Food Programme Head, citing the serious humanitarian crisis in the country. According to UN reports, Ukrainians are trapped in besieged Ukrainian cities, lacking access to food, water and essential services. Interestingly, from day one of the war, providing ‘uninterrupted internet’ connectivity to civilians tops the list of priorities for the Ukrainian government. As of now, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in partnership with Elon Musk has provided over 5,000 Starlink satellite internet terminals to Ukraine, which are largely up and running despite missiles and cyber attacks.

From absolute internet control to weaponization of public opinion, in many ways, the Ukraine war is a classic case of 21st-century Cognitive Warfare, pilot-tested successfully!

‘Persuade, Change, Influence and Command’

“Communication is a kind of war, its field of battle is the resistant and defensive minds of the people you want to influence. The goal is to advance, to penetrate their defenses and occupy their minds,” writes Robert Greene in his book “The 33 Strategies of War” (2006).

In the middle of the Ukraine War, the White House invited selected social media influencers on a zoom call to guide them on how to educate their millions of followers spread across the world, about U.S. policy on Ukraine. The White House digital strategy director tweeted: “An astonishing amount of people are learning about the invasion of Ukraine through digital creators who have begun to cover it,” and “we take that really seriously, and are working to make sure those creators have the ability to have their questions answered.”

That in simple words was an open invitation for social media influencers to join NATO Psy Ops and Cognitive Warfare against Russia.

What is Cognitive Warfare?

“Cognitive Warfare is the weaponization of public opinion by an external entity,” for “influencing public and governmental policy” and “destabilizing public institutions,” defines NATO’s report: ‘FALL 2020 – Cognitive Warfare – An Attack on Truth and Thought.’ The study says that Cognitive Warfare is different from earlier forms in the sense that it is not limited to controlling the “flow of information” rather it is a fight “to control or alter the way people react to information.” It highlights the “power of words/ ideas and non-kinetic war,” citing how “the Soviet Union watched the collapse of the Iron Curtain,” and the impact of the power of “blue jeans and rock and roll.”

The document mentions Russia 54 times, China 20 times, and Iran 6 times, citing how these three had waged cognitive attacks against the Western bloc through misinformation/ false narratives campaigns about the Corona outbreak and what the three could do in the near future. It highlights how the combination of social media, news networks, automation algorithms, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology is paving the way for a dangerous future and talks about adopting the “defense forward” doctrine of the USA, which means “preemptively preventing and proactively searching for attacks.”

A careful look at the Ukrainian leadership approach in this war reveals that it is largely inspired by findings of such NATO reports on psychological and cognitive warfare.

Cognition refers to “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses,” and Cognitive Warfare attempts to influence this process and its internal mechanism. A recent definition comes from Oliver Backes and Andrew Swab of Harvard’s Belfer Center, in their published work in Dec 2019 that says: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks – and through that how it acts.”

If we look around, from a teenager to adults to senior citizens, what are the sources for acquiring knowledge and understanding through “thought, experience, and senses,” in this Google’s system of the world?

According to a recent report “Digital 2022 – Global Overview,” there are approx 4.95 billion internet users in the world (62.5% of the global population) and 4.62 billion active social media users, who spend on an average 6 to 7 hours daily online. India comes in the list of countries where people spend more time than the average on the Web and now Gen Z (the generation born between 1997 and 2012) is the biggest target audience of these platforms. Major activities, which information prosumers (one who both consume and produce) perform online, include keeping up-to-date with news/events, watching/producing videos, TV shows/ movies/ gaming, live streaming content and chatting with family/ friends and social networks. And most importantly, all these activities they perform not with a routine mindset, there are inbuilt elements of ‘addiction’ in these algorithms that are the product of ongoing research on psychology, neurology, sociology and science of influence, designed to affect the ‘wetware’ of the human brain, which is also called the “grey matter” of the brain in which opinions/ perceptions are formed and decisions are made.

If Media is psychological and cognitive warfare’s most useful weapon then Content is its ammunition. Advanced research in the domains of Artificial Intelligence (AI), psychology and neuroscience has the potential to impact the cognitive functioning of human brains and when this potential gets leveraged for the psychological operations in real-time through a device that people carry 24/7 in their hands, the results are simply remarkable!

Zelenskyy’s Leadership Approach – a Brief Case Study on ‘Persuasion’

In the middle of the Russia-Ukraine War, Netflix decided to stream Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s political series “Servant of the People” again! It is a political TV series created and produced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who stars a 30-year-old history teacher, who got unexpectedly elected as the President of Ukraine (after a video of him ranting about the corrupt system goes viral). The series, which is the product of Kvartal 95 studio (a studio founded by Zelenskyy in 2003) ran for three seasons from 2015 to 2019. It is interesting that, while the series was still on the air, in 2018, Kvartal 95 studio registered a political party similar to the title of the series “Servant of the People,” and the whole election campaign of Zelenskyy was orchestrated to establish this narration that Zelenskyy in reel life and real life was the same.

Zelenskyy ran the entire presidential campaign on a virtual mode, avoiding human contact with his electorate, and addressed his voters through YouTube shorts, TikTok and Instagram posts and garnered millions of views. There was news that he also spent a good amount of time of his campaign producing the next three episodes of the TV series. An article “The World Just Witnessed the First Entirely Virtual Presidential Campaign,” published in Politico magazine on April 24, 2019, mentions that: “He not only traded on the image of a complete outsider, he also did no face-to-face campaigning, made no speeches, held no rallies, eschewed travel across the country, gave no press conferences, avoided in-depth interviews with independent journalists and, until the last day of campaigning, did not debate.”

The article further notes that Zelenskyy’s “virtual-first strategy” allowed him to run his campaign “on general themes and vague promises and to avoid issuing detailed positions on policy issues,” and the entire campaign was focused on the “discontent with the way things are—and lambasting Ukraine’s business and political elites for making them that way.” And finally, it concludes thus, “the U.S. and the West can help ensure that the choice Ukrainian voters have taken in electing an ambitious but untested political newcomer pays off and does not plunge Europe into an accelerating conflict with Russia.”

In a nutshell, from the 2019 election to the 2022 War, the internet and Western help were always on the back of Zelenskyy, and if one keeps the virtual propaganda aside, it seems like a classic case of installing a puppet leadership!

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 2)

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ALSO READ: An Approach to Deal with Technology Dominance (Part 1)

Technology-led Vision Blindness

More than technology dominance that can be sooner or later disrupted (with global consensus and mutual efforts), we will have to be concerned about its side effects. Somehow our current Internet generation thinks that by the accumulation of the abundance of information from the Internet/social platforms they are gaining knowledge and intelligence (which they would be able to upload into some cloud servers in the future, as these companies often claim). But this idea is flawed at its core; the human mind is not designed to work that way! After reading, listening, and watching, we need some time without outside distraction to think and make sense of all that we have observed.

The ability to foresee future events, threats, opportunities and different patterns related to these have a role in the policy/ direction of a nation. Our current generation has stopped practicing this and, like any other art this is also not a privilege, one may lose it. But the question is – can we afford to lose this skill? The absence of this skill can develop a ‘vision blindness’ syndrome and, when a community/society or nation turns vision blind, it always pays a cost for that.

ALSO READ: Pandemic : The Big Pharma Conspiracy

The notion of ‘Vision Blindness’ has its roots in the historic experiences of the Jewish community. In his book “The Founding Fathers of Zionism,” historian Benzion Netanyahu has mentioned that “the Jews, which in the distant past produced many personalities who excelled in prognosticating the future, became during the Exile a people that seemed to have virtually blind in this faculty.”He said that “we did not discern the greatest disasters even a short while before they occurred.” This was a period in which one may say that “vision disappeared from the people of Israel.”

Time to steal the firewood from under the pot has come!

The patterns of Technology Dominance are so complex that upon investigating the matter, one may reach a point where things seem to go into an uncertain and never-ending loop. But in the classics of war strategies, it is said that when faced with an enemy or force too powerful to engage directly, you must first weaken him by undermining his foundation and attacking his source of power (‘The Thirty-Six Strategies’, collection of ancient Chinese war tactics).

The source of Technology Dominance lies in an over-engagement and growing dependency of the people on these platforms. The more we get engaged, the more powerful these apps become. And this dependency is not natural as well, it’s a proven fact that these platforms are designed to arouse the addiction hormone in the users, just like any other addictive element, and the more we get engaged, the more powerful they become. So, the first step to tackle Technology Dominance must be reducing over-engagement on these platforms. We can call it the first step – Less Engagement.

Less Engagement means reducing our dependency on these Big Tech platforms and moving toward our local options – not just being vocal for local but embracing the local apps too. In the last few months, several homegrown alternatives to these popular apps have emerged such as Bharat E Market (a platform developed by Confederation of All India Traders, after a tussle with Amazon), Zoho Mail and its web hosting suite, Koo app, Sandes (government’s messaging app equivalent to WhatsApp) and payments apps like BHIM, PayTM, etc. We will see many more options in the coming days and we can expect some apps to be jointly developed with like-minded nations, too. When a user will have some options to select from, the psychological effect of these apps will automatically get minimized. Once we win that psychological war, dominance will be over.

After Less Engagement being successfully implemented, we can start disengaging from these tech platforms too!

Disengagement

This may sound offensive to some but who said that computers, the Internet and smartphones were the only technology on the planet and only by using these apps one could remain productive and technical! Who established this norm?

The original purpose of these products was to make our routine operations fast and easier. When these tech companies entered India, they came with a typical salesmen gesture and offered some very routine products like the office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), mail, search and some entertainment services – chat, networking, music, videos, games, and shopping. None of these must be given our 24/7 attention and productive energy. So the idea of Disengagement is – if we are using these products other than for their original purpose or their key functions – it means that we are over-engaged on these apps and we are over-engaged because these companies have addictive elements inbuilt in their products. This over engagement is crushing our inherent capabilities, our self-consciousness and without self-consciousness we cannot build great things. To end this addiction, this over-engagement and dependency, we will have to practice some Disengagement from these apps.

ALSO READ: Information Warfare : Curbs on Big Tech Necessary

The question then arises – how this Disengagement exercise can be promoted on a large scale?

We need to understand that computer technology, the Internet, smartphones, Big Data and AI are all some of the most successful business models of our time and they are leveraging their success to the fullest. A large portion of humanity (approx 4.66 billion people) is either over-engaged on tech platforms/ products or is over-influenced by their marketing. To disengage people from these business models, we will have to think about developing New Business Models. The New Business Models is an approach to coin some new ideas, thinking something new, more productive and more interesting and thrilling than all current dominating tech products. Continuing in this space and coining different jargon to leverage the market dominance can be a part of their calculations as they put a lot of effort to reach this stage. But a country like India must think about moving beyond this stagnation!

For a huge consumer segment, these augmented realities (AR), virtual reality (AR) and drone tech-based products, the users are offered thrill, pleasure and sense of adventure. They can be disrupted only with something more adventurous and more thrilling, something in the real world. If we aim to be shaper and more decisive, we will have to think about coining our improvisations and shaping some New Business Models, capable of competing with all the existing ones.

Interestingly, recognizing the stagnation and limitation of their products, these Big Tech founders have gradually started shifting toward new ventures. Agriculture, ocean, sky, air and space kind of domains are their new interest areas! Then why have we restricted ourselves to their products/ improvisations? We must think about going beyond smartphones and the Internet. We are a country surrounded by ocean, gifted with gigantic mountains and some of the world’s rarest natural resources and vibrant diversity. The need is to only explore and think in this direction. New Business Models originated from India can disrupt Big Tech hegemony!

Other Ethical Ways

Other than the Less Engagement and Disengagement process, what else can we do? We can adopt some other ethical ways, such as taxation, regulations, compliances and every single move that is needed for the health of the market and help these companies stay to do business, not to govern!

Recently, the Government of India issued some new guidelines and digital media ethics codes (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code 2021) that provide a progressive and liberal framework to deal with the challenges of social and digital media platforms. The Code includes a well-defined mechanism for grievance redressal, some guidelines for social media intermediaries, provisions regarding removal of unlawful information, as well as ethics codes for online news, over-the-top (OTT) platforms and digital media. This can be called a good beginning.

Public opinion and public pressure often seen as the key instruments of power. These cannot be allowed to be handled irresponsibly. Shaping the narratives, promoting porn and illegal trade, branding protest models, influencing election results and facilitating non-state actors to achieve their goals – these were not the ideas with which the Internet and digital technologies made their way into our life. With a broken security system and massive privacy flaws, these technology platforms dare challenge the constitution of the world’s largest democracy. We can hope that these ethical ways will help in curbing their aspirations.

Conclusion

The three moves – Less Engagement, Disengagement and Other Ethical Ways – together can provide a framework to deal with technology dominance and there is always a possibility to explore more innovative ways.

We have 28 states and eight union territories (UT), where each State/UT (and every district of the state) has its unique potential, a vast part of which is not leveraged. From space to sky to ocean to mountains, India has a lot to explore and a lot to create. The need is to stimulate the power of imagination of our young minds and to take that to a new level. Bharat can give at least 36 New Business Models to the world, based on its unique ability and instincts. The time for investing in that direction has come!

The post An Approach to Deal with Technology Dominance (Part 2) appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: An Approach to Deal with Technology Dominance (Part 2)

‘Technology dominance,’ these two words we hear quite often these days. From the last few years, Big Tech, Big Four, GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple), Tech Giants, Big Five kind of terms have become a part of our strategic discussions. Today, any deliberation on the future, economy and national security cannot be called complete without mentioning the patterns of growing tech dominance.

Computer technology is indeed one of the most dominant technologies from the last three to four decades. It started with the personal computers (PC) then came the era of the Internet, then smart phones, then smart devices and now we are talking about moving toward a new technological revolution driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI). But, at the same time, matters of concern are the shift in the purpose of digital technology from problem-solver to problem-creator to problem-accelerator to toolkit distributor, and its growing capability to not just impact overall social behavior and psychology but of creating anarchy, violence, and riots on the streets, within a matter of few minutes. The patterns of some recent events in different parts of the world suggest that now these platforms are becoming eager to challenge the idea of democracy, the idea of government and the idea of the nation itself.

Different Dimensions of Technology Dominance

A majority of the discussions about the technology dominance in India revolved around the Market and Data but there are some other lesser discussed dimensions as well, such as dominance in the real world, the acquisition/exploitation of natural resources – land, energy and water – that is going on a massive scale. There are close to 4.66 billion Internet users (roughly 60% of the world’s population), an average Internet user spends more than 6 hours a day online and produces approx 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (1 quintillion is equal to 1 exabyte, which is one preceded by 18 zeros). Every day, these platforms process billions of searches, millions of images, videos, billions of emails, video streaming, Twitter feeds, Facebook/ Linkedin/ Instagrams posts, text messages/chats, Gifs/Emojis, navigation data and the bulk of data that is generated from the smart things/devices, too. The data warehouses and factories where all this data is stored and processed every second requires gigantic infrastructure, massive systems for data storage, several processors and millions of miles of fiber-optic lines, everything which they cover under the smart term ‘cloud’ and these clouds on earth consume electrical power and generate heat that no other industrial enterprises have ever generated in human history, and then they consume billions of gallons of water to cool off as well. This is the real-world dominance of these Big Tech companies about which we do not find any climate expert raising concerns. In fact, in some cases, they are the top sponsors of these teenager flag bearers of climate change.

ALSO READ: PANDEMIC: Security Concerns Over Big Tech, Biotech and Big Pharma Loop

Apart from that, something more serious is going on under the sea as well. The 750,000 miles of submarine cables (total 406) enough to go around the earth 30 times, that connect the Internet worldwide – are the backbone of the Internet infrastructure. Today, the US tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, own or lease more than half of the global undersea cables. Google owns some 63,065 miles, Facebook owns 57,079 miles, Amazon owns approx 18,987 miles and Microsoft owns some 41,04 miles of undersea cables. And, with each passing year, their acquisition of undersea Internet infrastructure is growing.

Now the testing of shipping container-sized undersea data centres has started as well. In 2014, Microsoft launched a research project called ‘Natick’ to test this infrastructure and, as of 2020, they had completed the project and claimed that those servers under the water were more reliable than those on the land. The results of their project signalled that we will see a new dimension of undersea autonomy shortly. And the logic for such an experiment was a one-liner – “50% of us live near the coast. Why doesn’t our Data?”

Technology dominance is often facilitated by legislations too. In 2018, the US Senate enacted an act called CLOUD (clarifying lawful overseas use of data). The CLOUD Act allows US federal law enforcement agencies to compel U.S.-based technology companies or content providers to provide access to electronic data stored on their servers regardless of whether they are in the U.S. or on foreign soil. And it also says that if the foreign law enforcement agency (like that of India, where these products have complete dominance in the market) needs access to the electronic content stored in these data servers then they need to undergo an ‘executive agreement’ with the US government. The Act has the support of the whole Big Tech consortium (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook). Such moves give an extra edge to this ever-growing physical and virtual dominance. These are some of the interesting and least discussed dimensions of technology dominance, which have the potential to establish this idea as an everlasting reality of our time.

ALSO READ: Information Warfare : Curbs on Big Tech Necessary

Other than these, in terms of Market and Data (the most talked about dimensions), the situation is already bleak. If we talk about the Market, the journey of these U.S. tech giants in India started in 2004, with an entirely different set of promises than what they tout today. They came with the offers like office, search, music, emails, shopping and chats, some very routine tasks of the people. Except for Microsoft, which came earlier, somewhere in the 1990s, all other U.S. tech giants entered India, post-2004 and then, from 2004 to 2014, one can say that they got a whole decade of privileged access in India. The legacy of that unrestricted phase culminated into the current market dominance that we see today. As of May 2020, with 99.29 per cent, Google had a clear monopoly on the mobile search engine market in India. Google-owned YouTube now has over 448 million monthly active users in India and the Google-owned Android held a share of 95.23 percent of the mobile operating system market in India. Facebook has over 400 million users and 85 per cent market share in India, which is more than its home country USA. Amazon has over 100 million users and with 17.5 million active users, Twitter has the third largest user base in India, next after the USA and Japan. The data speaks that things are now beyond the simple profit/loss calculations.

Silicon Valley – Vision, Recommendations and Propaganda

In parallel to these mounting dimensions, the leading employers and investors of Silicon Valley and their friends and family members, all have some big plans for the future of humanity too. Often they can be seen talking about things like some ‘X’ pandemic or disaster already on our way and how we need to radically transform our lives to accommodate and adapt to that future. But interestingly, these technology prophets who are making such a prognosis, have their silent investments in the Biotech and Big Pharma companies too. In most cases, their life partners are leading such initiatives.

At regular intervals one will find some interview by Elon Musk, talking about things like AI is an ‘existential threat to humanity, raising concern on Google’s Deep Mind lab and claiming how scary and ‘weird’ the future is. And Musk is one of those who are not merely talking but preparing the solutions too, for example, the Neuralink kind of projects, that are about implantable brain–machine interfaces that Musk called a ‘Fitbit in your skull.’

There is a whole lobby of propagandists that exists in Silicon Valley. A massive propagation of ideas like the mindset of abundance, shifting humanity from ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ stage to ‘haves’ and ‘super haves,’ Universal Basic Income, Homo Deus, Cyborg, etc., is going on with different creative improvisations. In a nutshell, from Market and Data, things are now going toward body, mind and future.

Google Marxism

The idea that Silicon Valley represents the American ‘spirit of enterprise’ is not convincing anymore. The white hair technocrats and visionaries of the USA (who led the US economy in the Reagan era), call the Silicon Valley brigade ‘Neo Marxist.’ They refer to their approach as ‘Google Marxism’ and they have valid arguments for that, too. In his book “Life after Google”, George Gilder, one of the most quoted authors of US President Ronald Reagan, writes “The neo-Marxism of today’s Silicon Valley titans repeats the error of the old Marxists in its belief that today’s technology—not steam and electricity, but silicon microchips, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, algorithmic biology and robotics—is the definitive human achievement. The algorithmic eschaton renders obsolete not only human labor but the human mind as well.” When the powerful technology tycoons, with immense control of human life in their hands, try to push the obsolete ideas on their users, the concerns are only inevitable.

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