Weaponization of Artificial Intelligence

READ ALSO: Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence – Part 1 The idea of Artificial Intelligence weaponization 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 […]

READ ALSO: Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence – Part 2 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 […]