Artificial Intelligence and Power

Governance, Democracy and Military Capabilities

Counting again with the gracious leave of Aldous Huxley and his "Brave new world" we embark on another journey of exploration of this brave new world of ours. Artificial Intelligence and Power will be the waters that we will navigate in this second article of the series on AI. We sincerely hope that we may enjoy the privilege of your companionship, dear readers, in these explorations that we invite you to join us.

Matters of power, governance, democracy and military might are one of the utmost pressing issues of our contemporary world, deeply shaken with raging wars, autocrats rising within democracies themselves and yet another world's powers struggle, cold war style, not just looming in the horizon but happening just now,

The surge of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) might pose or not an existential risk in the near future, as we described in the last article. Current Generative Intelligence (AI) and chatbots as GPT4 are disrupting democracies and fair elections right now. AI is providing perilous ruses for democracies and highly dangerous warfare devices in our conflicting world.

We intend, dear readers, to set out for you all the significant information regarding those very sensitive issues, that are disrupting the very tenets of our world. We invite you, once more, to join us in the quest.

AI and Democracy

Carl J. Miller, scholar and resercher states: “ Political discourses have the power to shape the world and our lives.” When the world changes, also power changes. Revolutionary changes are reshaping the global scenario. AI has entered the play of politics.

Political misinformation has an old history, a history as old as politics themselves are, diving into the oceans of Antiquity Just remember the alleged Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that Bush Jr. used to trigger his desired war. We can go as back as the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece and far into a more distant past.. Today we have a new and most powerful player in that field, AI. The so called “deep fakes” are a highly pernicious tool now available to unscrupled politcians, political parties and covert organizations who want to influence domestic or foreign political events. Deep fakes are false images, voices or videos designed by generative AI to mislead, in every possible way, audiences keen for certainties in a dubious information environment. The fakes ugly faces have emerged, for example, in the fraught presidential campaign in Taiwan and in the battlefields of Ukraine, very important chessbords in the current global geopolitical playing field. Reliable information is now more important than ever, when citizens and netizens all around the world deeply distrust mainstream news media outlets, biased they maybe or not.

“Artificial Intelligence is a threat to democracy “ says UK government expert, Dame Wendy Hall. She is is a member of the UK government's AI Council, and also regius professor of computer science at the University of Southampton. Dear readers, What are the intentions and intended solutions of governments and large technology companies in this regard? Let's take a look.

Bletchley Park Summit

Last November, representatives and companies from 28 countries, including the US and China, as well as the EU, signed the pact that aims to tackle the risks of AI models. A “world-first” agreement on the safety of artificial intelligence (AI) was reached at a global summit in the UK, or so the say.

Technology experts, world leaders and representatives from 27 countries and the European Union attended the Artificial Intelligence Security Summit at Bletchley Park, once the birthplace of the code breakers of the Second World War, where Alan Turing the father of the computer worked.

The British Government called it a "world-first" agreement between the signatories, which aims to identify "AI security risks of shared interest" and create "respective risk-based policies between countries."

However, it is unclear how exactly the agreements will play out.

UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan declared the agreement a "landmark achievement" and "lays the foundation for today's discussions".The British Government also announced the holding of future summits on AI safety. Yes, sure they will.

South Korea will launch another "virtual mini-summit" on AI in the next six months and France will host the next in-person AI summit next year. However, experts argue that the agreement does not go far enough. They are right.

"Bringing together the great powers to support ethical principles can be considered a success, but concrete policies and accountability mechanisms must be quickly undertaken," Paul Teather, CEO of the AI research company, said."Vague terminology leads to misinterpretations, while relying solely on voluntary cooperation is insufficient to implement globally recognized good practices around AI," he continued.

Billionaire technology entrepreneur Elon Musk arrived at the summit and remained silent during the talks, but said the meeting seeks to establish an "arbitrator" for technology companies. "I think what we're trying to do here is to establish a framework so that there is at least one independent arbiter who can look at what the leading AI companies are doing and at least raise the alarm if they have doubts," he told the news agency. AP "I think what we're trying to do here is... first, establish that there should be a referee role, I think there should be. And then, you know, be cautious in how the regulations are applied, so as not to go on a charge with regulations that inhibit the positive side of AI,"

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1988 to facilitate comprehensive assessments of the state of scientific, technical and socioeconomic knowledge on climate change and its causes, potential impacts and response strategies. The Panel sends yearly reports to the UN, governments and other international agencies. The most significant idea that came from the Bletchley Park Summit is to create a similar AI panel that will also send yearly reports. Dear readers, we all know how the fight against climate change is faring, don’t we?

That collage of conflicting interests can only be decoded with difficulties, because there are so many ,contradictory with others and self contradicting also. As unifying principle maybe, in the words of the above quoted Carl J: Miller “The Power elite is mostly unregulated” Big tech corporations are fundamentally profit driven, although AI counter Powers can be created by governments. The point is that the latter themselves have conflicting interets within themselves in AI enhanced survellance devices or military capabilities, just to name some of them. In realpolitik terms, power has no ethics or morals. A lot of balancing acts are needed here. We do not think that those are feasible in the near future, but, dear readers, we serve you food for thought and it is up to you to draw your own opinions. We are well aware that distrust in governments and democracies run deep. “If voting made an difference, they wouldn¨t let us do it”, once Mark Twain wrote.

Breaking News…as this article is bieng wirtten, The New York Times titles “ E.U. agrees on landmark Aritificial Intellegence Rules “ and later “European policy makers focused on AI’s riskiest uses by companies and governments, including those for law enforcement and the operation of crucial services…”. Let’s see how that works out.

AI and warfare

AI and contemporary warfare is a complex and ever evolving issue that has many implications of conflict and security. AI can be applied to many aspects of warfare such as intelligenece, reconnaisance, targeting, commnand and control, logistics, cyberoperations and autonomous weapons. Remember the AI automated killing robots?

Some potential benefits of AI in warfare examples are enhancing situational awareness, improving accuracy and efficiency, less human errors, and creating new capabilities and strategies. However, AI beckons challenges and risks,among them ethical, legal, moral and humanitarian dilemas. vulnerability to adversarial attacks and manipulations, escalations and instability, loss of human control and accountability.

The main questions surrounding the use of AI in warfare are:

• How we can ensure that AI systems are aligned with human values and comply with the laws of war and human rights ? Very difficult question.

• How we can mantain strategic stability and deterrence in a “brave new world” AI where AI could create new domains and ways to conduct new modes of conflict, such as cyberwarfare , information warfare and hybrid warfare. ? Such a complex task awaits…

• How can we foster cooperation and trust between nations and stakeholders to develop AI responsably and transparently?

Dear readers, the answers lie somewhere in the future… We sincerely hope that you join us again in this quest of the “brave new world” in our next article on this subject.

Artificial Intelligence and Humanity

Are we living in a brave new world, as Aldous Huxley famously entitled his book ? Perhaps. What sort of new world looms in our future? Albeit we have some clues, actually we don´t know for certain., in this article, dear readers, we endeavor to give you some hints, some food for thought for you.

Arti.ficial intelleigence (AI) was, during the last few decades, the subject of study of sophisticated and highly trained scientists and resarrchers. Sure, their knowledge abouy AI is deep and vast, altough within certain and strict limits.

AI was a mch researched and debated topic in that scientific community, but a misterious and maybe somehow miraculous to the general public; more science fiction than actual science. Not anymore. The recent realease of Chay GPT, an AI chatbot, by Open Source has attracted more than 100 million users in a matter of weeks after it was available for everybody worldwide.

Ai is now a very important subject on the global mainstream debate now. Chat GPT became a household name. The CEO of Open Source, the company that launched the chatbot globally, is Sam Altman, a longitme Silicon Valley charachter who founded the firm in 2015 as non profit organization in 2015, with Elon Musk and others as it backers. It was a non profit outfit, but Microsoft invested in it US$ 1 billion. A 2019 for for profit branch created and Microsoft’s USD $ 10 billion investement later, Open AI as now we know it surfaced in the tech world. The non profit and for profit branches coexisted, not always peacefully. Recently, the revolving firing and sacking of Sam Atman as CEO became a Silicon Valley soap opera, a high tech carousel spinning over and over again. This is al over the news as this article is written, the intrigues unwiding. Soap operas maybe kitsch, but Silicon Valley's soap operas can be amusing and dramatic. Would'nt you agree?

Generative AI and Large Language Models

Chat GPT is an open source AI chatbot. Such devices are trained with texts, images and data all across the whole Internet. Millions and millions of texts ranging from Wikipedia and the Britannica Encyclopedia through all digital libraries to the wide range of social networks are the chatbot’s data learning material. That is why they are named Large Language Models (LLMs). The godmather of this learning method is the pioneer scientist Fei Fei Li, born in Beijing and now a professor at Stanford University.

The LLms are radically changing the way humans search, acquire and gain access to knowldge; not from other humans, but from a chatbot. Wikipedia, at the dawn of the Internet age, was a global project to créate an online encycopedia, wirtten by all those who wished to do so and available to all those that wanted to read. At first, it was flawed and demeed unreliable. Not anymore. Wkipedia has turned 22 years old in 2023, hosts more than 61million articles, written 334 languages , huge amonuts of reliable information, verifed by more than 40,000 editors in the English language alone. Ai chatbots answers to queries are not always accurate and they sometimes suffer “hallucinarions”. We will return to those soon. So, knowlwdge from humans to humans is increasingly being replaced by chatbot providers, which randomly give answers with a mix of accurate and false data.

Chat GPT is not the only AI game in the world. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has “Deep Mind”, a chatbot acquiered from a british tech startup, perfected and optimized later up to Alphabet’s goals. That tech giant has also its Aritificial General Intelligence (AGI) project also. The chief mind behind Google´s AI products and projects, Geoffry Hinton, an AI pioneer, resigned over concerns about the dangers for humanity that AIG may cause.

Meta, another tech giant, is also busy with AI. Some devices are the brain childrenof Marck Zuckerberg’s obssesion with meta-reality. Users may chat with Meta’s AI via Whatsapp, Messeger, Instagram as that chatbot was a real human person, named Llama2. Next in line, are the AI “glasses”, named Ray Ban Meta, and Quest 3.

The question of knowledge is out there. , in search for an answer. What will happen? Your guess is as Good as ours. The answer is in that future “ brave new world”.

Artificial General Inteliigence. Gloom and Glee

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is an advanced type of AI than can perorm all the tasks and dispaly all the capabilities a human beign can. Super Artificial Intelligence can surpass everything a human can do, it even surpasses what current supercomputers can achieve, no matter how powerfull they may be. It will have consciousness, the means to perfect itself or ven reproduce itself. This is not a dream, is a reality beckoning just around the corner.

“The problem is that nobody really knows what is exactly going on inside o fan AI chatbot”, says Will Knight, a higky trained and specialized journalist that has been reporting on AI fr the last 15 years. Hence, the so called “hallucinations” issue mentioned above. As AGI concerns, this not just a minor issue of disinformation. Artificial General Intelligence can be a blessing for humanity or its worst nightmare. Super AIG can be capable of solving pressing existential issues as climate change or the pollution of oceans, or suffer “halucinations” and given the order to solve climate change, it may conculde that as humans cause climate change, they must be wiped of the fase of the earth. This is not a science fiction scenario, lke the Terminator’s film in which intelligent machines are fightinhg humankind to destroy it, as a manner of saying in a sort of wink to a a pop culture dystopia. It is a real possiblity that must be dealt with now. Do you really understand the perils, thus far? Do you understand the great posible advantages to us all, thus far?

AI doomers on one side and AI enthusiasts on the other side, gleeing as heralds of a new Renaissance for humanity contend with each other. Of course, we do not know who is right. Some examples follow.

Gloom

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning.He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). He says: “ “We think that AGI is comimg sooner that expexted. Socienties are not ready for the power that will be unleashed and the distuptions to come. Misisuse and loosing control of AIG are likey scenarios”

Big tech corporate heavywhiights, reaserchers, scientists as Elon Musk and many others recently signed an open letter proposing to halt AI development for at least 6 months in order to asses AGI risks. They argue theyht be similar to raging global pandemics or a worldwide nuclear conflict.

Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, as we said above. “I am scared that if you make AI the technology work much better, you help the NSA (US National Security Agency) misuse it more. I'd be more worried about that than about autonomous killer AI robots.”

Gleeing about AI

There are those that disagree with the doomers, privately implying that the suffer a kind of “ Frankenstein delusion syndrome” Yann André LeCun is a Turing Award winning French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta. "The apocalyptic claims about AI are preposterous. Safeguards can work. We can hirewire laws and safeguards into AI constraints in a way we cannot do with humans", he argues.

Andreessen Horowitz a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The founders were Silicon Valley veterans turned now into high tech start up financiers. They realesed a manifesto stating that tehcnology and capitalism are the only solution. That is really a way to smuggle unfettered AI tech to the markets. All too natural, because business is profit driven.

Some big power governments are also covert AI enthusiasts. Some big power governments are also convert AI enthusiasts, in spite of the Bletchley Park summit held in november proposing regulations or the recent US Biden Administration AI regulatory directive. AI military capabilities are too enticing. "If China has it, why won't we", the USA may think. "If the USA has it, why won?t we", China could reply.

More to come

This is the first of a series of articles on Artificial Intelligence. Our intention is to adress the ways that AI may affect all aspects of human governance and power; the economy, the consuemers,trade, cand Jobs, to name a few.

We hope that you, dear readers, will join us in this quest.