Weaponization of Artificial Intelligence

Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence – Part 2

January 30, 2023February 26, 2023 Devsena Mishra

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 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).

[Also Published at : Indian Military Review] Read PDF version from here…