Digital Uncertainty in India
Context:
- Recently, governments, corporations, and the general public have all shown a keen interest in the developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI). A thorough analysis on the prospects presented by this current AI wave was also just released by the Indian government.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Types:
- The intelligence of computers or software, as opposed to the intellect of people or animals, is known as artificial intelligence (AI). Additionally, computer science research in this area focuses on creating and studying intelligent devices. The term “AI” may also apply to the actual devices.
- Conventional AI, sometimes referred to as Narrow or Weak AI, concentrates on carrying out a certain task intelligently. These systems are capable of learning from data and using that data to inform judgements or forecasts.
- Conversely, generative AI represents the next evolution of artificial intelligence. This type of AI is capable of producing original work.
Generational AI’s implications:
- It is nearly a given among Indian IT industry leaders that this wave of AI would result in fundamental changes to the skills environment as well as implicit changes about underlying threats and dangers. Digital uncertainty is growing exponentially at the same time.
- In terms of importance, cognitive warfare is on par with other aspects of contemporary warfare including the marine, aviation, and space domains. Advanced tactics that target the destabilisation of institutions, particularly governments, and the manipulation of the media by influential non-state actors are highly valued in the context of cognitive warfare. It involves the skill of manipulating human targets’ cognition by technology means, typically without the targets’ knowledge.
- A loss of confidence could be the ultimate consequence, in addition to secrecy violations and diminished governance capacities. The possibility that it may use complex psychological manipulation techniques to change the conduct of a populace makes it much more dangerous.
- These days, businesses in the most developed nations of the world are putting themselves at direct risk from artificial intelligence (AI) since nearly one-third of them invest more in intangible assets than in real ones. According to another assessment, the top 500 corporations are also extremely vulnerable, with intangibles accounting for over 50% of their market worth.
- The hazards increase geometrically as more and more sensors continuously send out sensitive data and as businesses of all sizes spend billions of dollars migrating to the Cloud. Radical uncertainty is quickly emerging from digital uncertainty.
- The degree to which artificial intelligence (AI) is responsible for many of these profound changes, as well as how information itself is being exploited, are not well understood. All of this adds to the phenomenon that can only be described as “truth decay.”
The appearance of AGI:
- We are merely seeing the tip of the iceberg if artificial intelligence is the serious threat that the world is currently considering. The fact that many improvements in AI are now being created by the machine itself is both thrilling and terrifying at the same time.
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which will replace human judgement, intuition, and creativity, will arrive sooner rather than later. AGI is defined as artificial intelligence that is either superior to or equivalent to human intelligence. It will permeate whole new industries.
- More disruptive and deadly than anything we have yet experienced, artificial intelligence is about to dawn. There will be a sharp increase in social and economic inequality. The streets will be ruled by social anarchy, as is now the case in some of the cities nearest to the hub of technical progress.
- It is inherently capable of inundating a nation with false information that passes for real, as well as of mimicking well-known voices with uncannily similar counterfeit ones.
- Highly autonomous systems that perform better than humans in a variety of domains, such as social welfare, education, and commercially valued labour, will be made possible by AGI.
- While it is still impossible to fully understand, economic and employment dislocation would be the first signs of what might eventually become a tsunami that affects nearly every aspect of human activity.
- It will almost certainly result in significant changes to the geopolitical power structure, in ways that have never been fully understood before. Due to the concentration of AGI-based power centres in a few number of places, the threat of digital colonialism is quite real.
- As such, disruption caused by AGI may hasten the advent of the digital colonial era. This would result in data exploitation, a new type of exploitation. In its most extreme form, it would involve the import of value-added products that utilise this data and the export of raw data.
- To put it succinctly, an AGI-based consolidation of power would bear uncanny resemblances to the legacy of the East India Company. We may be on the verge of a “Oppenheimer Moment,” in which the ethics of a new technology whose potential and power we do not completely understand, as well as the science of computers, communication, and engineering, come to a crossroads.
The Israeli-Hamas conflict:
- AI can be cleverly used and controlled in some circumstances, as may have been the case in the ongoing Israeli-Hamas confrontation, also known as the Yom Kippur War 2023. Some academics blame Israel’s catastrophic intelligence failure on overuse of artificial intelligence, which Hamas expertly exploited.
