In 2017, consistent with some traditions of preserving Tibetan lamas after their deaths, I had written of an advanced digital replica as a means to preserve the persona of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Since then, AI personas, replicas and digital twins, have come of age. In 2023, an actors’ union went on a strike demanding protection from generative AI applications. While AI replicas and…
I want to draw parallels between two species-wide disturbances which really shook faith in existing systems. Systems is a fine abstract word which covers all we may be interested in - from social and political to technical - and as John Gall has aptly articulated, we live immersed in a new age of faith, the age of 'faith in systems'. Both of these two disturbances which I concern myself with…
The contemporary discourse on data governance has been compromised by Data Idealism which approaches data as primarily a social and techno-legal artifact. There are islands of data idealism, such as data ethics, "Free Flow with Trust", data decolonisation, data feminism, ethical AI development and others which basically suggest that much of the social, political, and economic consequences of our…
Recently, for an academic workshop I had to submit a brief on China as a latecomer in global technology standardisation. Notwithstanding the Napoleonic assessments of the waking of a sleeping giant, I argue that the Chinese “latecoming” in global technology standardisation has been more of a “coming of age” instead. As Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi note , presently China has twice the manufacturing…
The root of all evil is a premature policy optimization. In the few decades of the history of computing in India there have been some spurts of proactivity, but by and large other than a large bodyshop in IT, we have been comfortable in a mode largely reactive to global developments, with an industry making negligible contribution to computing technologies. Just after liberalisation, C. R.…
There circulate these days a variety of rumors of technological destruction - from an impending AI doom to a US-China technological decoupling and subsequent showdowns, or even an escalation of "small wars" into a litany of CBRN scenarios - for all we know (do we ever?), the internet could well be full of competing social botnets programming us for our imminent futures. Nevertheless, these rumors…
Recently, Sam Altman had been touring the world attempting (perhaps) a regulatory capture of global AI developments. No wonder that OpenAI does not like open-sourced AI, at all. Nevertheless, this post isn’t about AI development, but its security and standardization challenges. Generally, an advanced cyber threat environment, as well as the defenders’ cyber situation awareness and response…
Tigress & Serpent, Thomas Landseer When ChatGPT was released, soon arose several continuing Chinese whispers of the online variety that expressed discontent over the AI being too "lobotomised". These are also valid concerns after all, for information (the semantic significance of it, not the syntactical expression itself), or the deliberate absence of it, can often be political. And consequently,…
"To live effectively is to live with adequate information." Norbert Weiner had maintained that nature has an inherent tendency to degrade the organized. The organism, according to him, is opposed to death and disintegration "as message is to noise" - postulating a perpetual conflict between the self-organising and the organised. This is evident everywhere. Take, for example, the rules based world…
Does your program have too many dependencies/relations with the outside environment? Recently a question appeared on a prediction forum asking whether a nationalized AGI research group would arrive at AGI before the private sector. This is interesting because most AGI research is done privately at the fringes of AI community. Whether or not, and how well, dedicated nationalized organizations would…
Sambo sivam, jagame thandiram. The deregulation of Indian geospatial data sector may have opened opportunities for some leeway in India’s strategic framework, though of course slight reorientations maybe required at comfortable places. The strategic security outlook over GIS still has some traces of the older days of Bhaskar and Rohini satellites where data handling rate used to be in few…
Systems fail because engineers protect the wrong things, or protect the right things in wrong ways. - Ross Anderson, Security Engineering [Art by Shibara ] Recently, yours truly ran into the use of analytical wargaming as a methodology to address policy problems at the intersectionality of AI risks, cyber security and international politics. While the critics of wargaming do espouse some valid…
A couple of years ago, the US quietly put a worldwide export control on convolutional neural network based geospatial imagery software, the reason being its potential use by foreign militaries. It is worth noting that these are commercial software products which if open-sourced, their hardware dependencies aside, would not be treated under international jurisprudence as products but instead as…
There was the sound like a rumor without any echo of history, really beginning. Following the recent Chinese overtures towards Arunachal, Ladakh, and Sikkim - notably sending troops, altering maps, taking land and calling for peace - there now hopefully would have enkindled some degree of sovereign urgency among Delhi's international security leaders towards a reassessment of some of our…
As systems become more complex, they are also likely to fail in ways of which the exact mechanism might be harder to predict and understand beforehand. With machine-learning systems, there is a bigger problem than failure, which is exhibiting a potentially dangerous behavior as and when failure occurs, as part of the system/sub-system failure. This concern is understandably further magnified in…
Following a previous article on multinational interoperability , some elementary inspection of complications was needed since the use of AI in the context of modern strategic systems exacerbates the pre-existing modalities governing the formation and functioning of coalitions. Further to the differences in standards, cultures, and mutual trust, traditional international political-military…
"We tend to forget that throughout history many decision-makers were delighted to accept “double or nothing” tactics if the odds looked sufficiently favorable." Kahn Too constrained to maximize? Alexander Kotov, the Chess grandmaster with eyebrows worth a queen sacrifice and probably also a KGB fellow, was quite on the mark while describing a disposition to make judgmental errors and go with a…
" My sculptures are like no other known geometrical solid, but they look just like a cube, a pyramid or another known or absurd solid. This means that three observers at three different points would see three different solids. " - Guido Moretti The more intently we are occupied with something, the harder our system works to suppress distractions . Sometimes, we are skillfully distracted away from…
" Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books. " -Hannibal Society only tolerates a certain kind of deviance, the kind that has a great or novel expectation of rewards. AI engineers too reflect these tendencies when treating that certain kind of deviance in agents as a refreshing intelligent behavior, given that it is rewarding to the larger interests. A rudimentary example of…
“ We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in Rough Consensus and Running Code. ” David Clark, 1992 The above quote while originally intended to express many technologists’ view on the matter of internet standardization, also beautifully represents their political and sociotechnical values when it comes to the matter of our economic evolution: that is, rough c onsensus & r unning c ode…
Mathematicians argue that it is a mathematical fact, that often the most rational way of making a decision is to simply flip a coin. No wonder, most of human and societal behavior borders on irrationality. But while probability is about numbers, as Glenn Shafer says, it is also about the structure of reasoning. Humans have an ability to execute a continuous manipulation of weight distribution over…
There is circulating an article on AI, based on the idea that intelligence explosion is impossible and that there is no such thing as general intelligence. Here it is , and it is rather well written, so definitely worth a read. "Singularity" as it is talked about is largely a buzzword, exploiting the fantasy of this mythical exponential rise of machines' intelligence. The "explosion" is happening…
Electric-Ray fish is a soft smooth-skinned animal which has evolved to grow modified muscle tissues that generate up to 30 amperes of current, the fish needs this power to defend itself in the ocean and successfully capture its prey. Somewhere in 100-200 AD a Greek physician named Galen started to beat the head of his depressed and pain-ridden patients with a live electric-ray fish. His patients…
Alice and Bob are selfish people who should never trust each other, maybe I do not really know, but they certainly use all kinds of cryptography and masks and games to bolster their stealth and pursue their interests, so I’ll say that these two actors never truly trust or promise and always feign some trust in some reality, that is what they believe the state of affairs to be which directs their…
“ Life is warfare and a journey far from home. ” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations It is assumed that man, by his very nature, attempts to impose his will upon his environment and meets a resistance at some point leading to a conflict of interests. This is where he strategises to meet his goals, negotiates his interests, compromises his advances, or tries to neutralize the opposition altogether. The…