In the 21st century, war becomes multifaced, conflict is not limited to traditional weapons-based reprisal, rather it is turning into a multidimensional front, for example, cyber warfare, soft warfare, and economic warfare, and also in coming years conflict will involve artificial intelligence (AI) based warfare (already started, example, recent Israel Palestine conflict). Here, we will mainly discuss economic warfare. Before that let us understand a little about cyberwarfare. Cyber warfare is the use of computers by governments, state-sponsored groups, and individuals to attack other computers or networks for espionage, sabotage, and military purposes. Cyberwarfare may include computer attacks that are intended to cause physical damage to a target (e.g., a nuclear power plant), as well as the destruction of the data on computers and networks. This is done by controlling the computers of the attacked computer, thus shutting it down. For example, in 2007, a group of hackers known as "Lizard Squad" from the United States launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Sony.
Economic warfare is a type of war that involves economic actions and attempts to bring about political or social change via economic means with no regard for military confrontation. This can be done by using certain types of sanctions either against a country or companies in that country. In the past, this type of warfare has caused the countries to be affected by high obstacles, as well as leading to a weakening of their economy.
The first known use of economic sanctions was during the Peloponnesian War, which was between Athens and Sparta. Athens used them to hurt Sparta's economy by cutting off trade with Persia. In 1848, Great Britain used them against the United States because they ended up fighting with Mexico for possession of California. During World War II, Japan imposed an economic blockade on China. The country placed blockades on the Chinese ports and prohibited them from importing raw materials, such as steel, petroleum, rubber, paper, and wood.
In the 21st century, this form of war has become more common. It is used by many countries and organizations to put pressure on other countries and groups. This includes targeting companies that do business with a country or group that they are opposed to. It also includes denying a country or group access to international economic markets by blocking trade deals between other countries and the one they are targeting. However, in the age of AI and big data, economic warfare is going to be invisible to the common mass and even to the policymakers, which I am going to discuss in depth. In the coming sections, we will discuss, ‘How can access to big data combined with the analytical power of AI drastically give an edge over the country that lags behind these two?’ At this juncture, ‘I would say, giving away access and control over big data of a country to other countries is like giving them access to its nuclear weapon.’ This point would be clear as we logically evaluate the power of big data and its consequences on a country’s economy and sovereignty.
Shortly (or even it has already started) war will involve artificial intelligence (AI). The reader who is unaware of AI, in simple terms, artificial intelligence is a human-made algorithm/computer program that is intended to learn itself, make decisions, and perform a particular/general task without the intervention of humans. The concept of a human-made algorithm for AI will remain valid till the AI itself writes its own program. The point when the AI will write its own program is popularly known as the point of singularity. Beyond this point humans need not improve the code of the AI, rather it will improve its code itself to make itself more intelligent. Although, in the present scenario, the AI is capable of gaining superhuman capability in specific fields say playing chess, however, general intelligence i.e. human level or super human-level intelligence is the ultimate goal of this field of computer science.
In the age of information technology and artificial intelligence (AI), data would be a very important resource or a weak point of a country depending on how it protects and utilizes it. A country like India, where more than 1.3 billion people reside, generates a tremendous amount of data daily. Now before we discuss why the data is very important for a country to safeguard them, let us discuss how we generate digital data daily. More than 50 crore people in India use a smartphone, and at least each smartphone contains say 10 applications(app). There are various ways a smartphone user can generate data on a day-to-day basis. Let us first discuss the data generation due to social media, whenever you log in to a social media account, or even just connect to the internet, new data get generated, moreover, whenever we install an app most of the time, we give permission to the access of our location, camera access, and also access to our device’s mic. You must have realized the fact that sometimes you discuss any topics with your friend, next time whenever you open your social media or search engine, you get to see advertisements related to that topic. That means, your device was listening to your conversations and according to that, a feed was delivered. This implies most of these applications in our device constantly generate data of the location, discussion, videos, images, and sometimes physical parameters such as body temperature, sleep pattern, heart signal, etc, (provided such sensors are available to the device). Some of the data even are generated without our awareness. Another way data is generated is through your active participation. For example, you log in to social media, upload a photo, video, document, write a blog, etc. They even get generated when you like a social media post, comment on the post, post a photo, etc. Another huge data generation source is the video uploading platform e.g. YouTube. You click any photo, video, content, etc, and everything is monitored and analyzed by the artificial intelligence algorithm of the service provider. Your likings, dislikes, your thought processes are predicted by the AI, and accordingly, you are getting a regular feed from the internet advertisements, google search results, etc. Now it will not be exaggerated to say that at a particular point in life, the artificial intelligence in your beloved device/service provider will understand you more than you understand yourself. Even recent studies found that by using an AI algorithm, the service provider was able to manipulate the customer’s decision by consistently recommending biased content to the customer to manipulate the buyer’s decision to their benefit. Now, we have come to an understanding of what service providers with AI can do to our society. So what!!, they are manipulating the customer to sell their product. The concern is not selling a product, it may be very serious when the mass population is being manipulated for biasing towards some products from a particular country or creating less confidence among citizens about the home-grown product. This way, the economy of a country can be manipulated without even being aware of the policy-making body of the country. The lack of homegrown essential products especially lifesaving drugs, medical equipment, communication tools, and military equipment and weapons may be a concern during situations like a pandemic, international conflicts, natural calamities, etc.
Moreover, the selling of products with the aid of AI intervention of a particular kind is a threat up to a certain level. However, it is too risky to be influenced by the external force to advance a certain political ideology, not only by our politicians within our nation, rather it will be too unsafe to be manipulated by an outsider. In addition, surveillance cameras connected to public places generate enormous data, which is also a very important treasure trove for understanding public behavior at various stages of the time frame. The analysis of these data can give enormous information about the collective behavior of people from a particular place, community, etc, which otherwise can’t be understood using discrete human-centric analysis. Another important and easily accessible parameter is the live location data of a user of a smartphone user. Analyzing these data can help the Artificial intelligent algorithm to understand the movement of a particular person. How can these data be useful to make some meaningful decisions? Now let’s take one example, depending upon the distance covered by a person and also say other parameters, speed of his/her walking, driving, sitting time, etc, the AI algorithm could find that for some particular parametric value, people are suffering from blood sugar problems. Now, AI can help pharmaceutical company to make a prediction that in the coming few years how many people are going to affect by blood sugar disease. Accordingly, the company may produce that particular number of medicines. Another aspect of data generation and mass data access may be the outcome of the Internet of Things (IoT). For the reader, those who are unaware of IoT, the Internet of Things is the network of physical devices that may contain various sensors to generate data and connect through the Internet to share and analyze the data. For example, in a house, your TV, computer, table clock, refrigerator, washing machine, speaker, door lock, and air conditioning devices are connected to the internet through a smart AI device say Alexa. Now, you can program and monitor or even access the devices through the internet or even the AI can inform you about the vegetable inside your fridge or unlock your door whenever you reach home. Although, the IoT environment is in the very early stage of development in India, however, this is the right time to make policy about the fate of those enormous data in coming years.
Now let us understand the scenario of Indian data generation and flow direction. The majority of individuals in India use social media sites that are largely controlled by other countries and data storage and access are likewise controlled by foreign nationals. As we know international relations are not permanent, which in simple language, no country is a permanent friend or permanent enemy. Before we discuss the data storage and access scenario, let us take the example of the scenario raised during the first wave of pandemic COVID 19 in India. We desperately felt the unpreparedness of our health sector to tackle the pandemic situation. Also, all kinds of restrictions on getting access to healthcare supplies and medications from outside country suppliers. Another problem we faced was the lack of home-grown virtual conferencing software, despite being one of the leading IT service providers in the world. Although, we tried to solve the problem with extreme urgency, however, the situation may not be the same in the case of data access and storage. Now let us consider a scenario where all the social media and search engines denied providing services to India, and also denied providing access to the data e.g. access to emails, saved passwords, cloud storage data, etc. The situation would be unimaginable, and a chaotic situation may arise. This is one of the simple examples. Now let us discuss a big issue in the long term, very few giant companies are only gathering all the data and also the analytical powers (AI) to extract and understand the big data. If things continue in the same fashion, a time definitely will come when those companies will be in a position to manipulate the government in the country by using the power of data access and AI. This has already started, even some of the social media are daring to challenge the ruling government due to their popularity, data richness or we may say AI power. This is the beginning of an unthinkable issue which going to be more prominent in the coming decades. If the monopoly of data access and data storage remains in the hand of a few industrial giants and the progress of artificial intelligence continues even on the same page, I speculate, in the coming few decades, these giant companies will have the ultimate power to topple any government where their presence is in dominant share. In such a scenario, India is no exception, if we don’t take any decisive action keeping in mind the possibility of power transition to a few giant companies or organizations, the outcome would not only be problematic to our country, but it may also have adverse effects throughout the world.
By
Abhijit Chandra Roy
DST-Inspire Faculty
Department of Physics
IISc Bangalore
E-mail: abhijit.ch.roy1@gmail.com
