Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to restructure the global balance of power, promising unmatched innovation while posing existential risks. With capabilities far surpassing human intelligence, AI is revolutionizing industries, geopolitics, and warfare. However, its unchecked growth risks widening global inequalities and creating digital hierarchies. Challenges lie not only in technology but also in ethics, regulation, and strategy. For India, AI represents both an opportunity and a responsibility to align its evolution with national security and cultural sensibilities in the Amritkaal era.
LT GEN RAJ SHULKA (RETD)
FOR TNJ
a 4 mins read.
Here are some attributes of Goddess AI that might be of particular salience and interest. In the wake of AI, we are told that the world will be reborn and remade. AI will solve the complex problem of intelligence, and the crystal logic of AI algorithms will, in turn, help solve the problems of the world.
THE INTELLECTUAL POWERHOUSE
Look at the sheer intellectual horsepower of the technological beast. One of the world’s smartest humans, Albert Einstein, was blessed with an IQ of 160. Chat GPT-4 has an IQ of 155; Chat GPT-6, three years down the line, will have an IQ of 1550. By 2037 or so, AI will be a billion times smarter than humans.
Just as the advent of personal computing fundamentally changed humanity, Al will transform the way we live and work: it will impact white- and blue-collar jobs equally and in dramatic ways. Like other technological waves before, AI also seems to be following an immutable law: it is getting cheaper, easier to use, and increasing far and wide—as it does so, it could also become infinitely dangerous – perhaps more than nuclear weapons. In the case of atomic weapons, the decision to launch is still with us; we still train AI models and control them, we can shut them off, but if we are not careful about protocols, AI could elude human control.
AI’s unrivalled computational abilities are revolutionizing work and life, but its unchecked growth risks escaping human control, potentially exceeding even nuclear weapons in danger.
GLOBAL DIVIDE
The real game in AI may be moving to the frontier models, barely three or four in number, where the only players are the USA and China. These models which will set the tone and tenor in AI for the future, are not only huge energy guzzlers but are also phenomenally expensive – they need huge investments, in the realm of $350 billion apiece. For a while there was hope for the democratization of AI – the gap between the frontier and trailing models had begun to reduce; of late, driven by intensifying Sino-US competition, the gap has once again started to grow exponentially. We may be heading, therefore, towards a kind of AI hegemony; those who trial will avail the products and fruits of AI alright but will be at the mercy of those that determine the structuring of the philosophical frame of AI. According to the global accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, AI will add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 – and the two AI superpowers will romp home with 70 % of the spoils. AI, therefore, is poised to transform the balance of power – and create a new set of strategic haves and have-nots in the international system. The prospect of Digital Colonisation as Rajiv Malhotra points out in his remarkable book – AI & the Future of Power, is real.
SOCIO-TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGES
AI is also a socio-technological challenge. Only 20-30% of the AI piece is technological – about coding, LLMs, etc. 70% of the challenge in AI is about proficiencies in allied domains – philosophy, strategy, culture, sensibilities, the richness of data, domain-specific leveraging, ethics, safety, the nature of regulation, et al. Henry Kissinger points out quite incisively that AI is a rapidly exploding technology in search of a guiding philosophy – in the absence of a larger philosophical view, the technologists are running wild. We need to develop a larger conceptual frame, an ambit in which this very intelligent, powerful, technology piece of AI can be fused productively.
The Chinese outlook on AI, interestingly, is sharp but worrying: it talks of a regulated civilian path and a freewheeling strategic-military sphere. In the arena of national security, it is simply charging ahead – there are no barriers.
GEOPOLITICS AND AI WARFARE
The intersection of AI and geopolitics may be even more impactful. As Yuval Harari points out in his latest offering, ‘Nexus,’ just as the Iron Curtain was pervasive in Cold War 1.0, the Silicon Curtain (one embedded in codes & chips) will shape Cold War 2.0. The Silicon Curtain will not only divide the world into two rival, digital orders with very different worldviews – a USA-led West and the very nascent CRIK (China-Russia-Iran-North Korea); two orders that barely communicate, agree on very little and are certainly incapable of regulating the explosive power of AI. Such a Silicon Curtain will not only divide one group of humans from another but also separate humans from their new AI overlords – unfathomable algorithms that manage our lives, and shape our politics, information systems, media, health care, culture, social structures, diplomacy, and economics. The beginning perhaps of an Artificial Intelligence Empire – cascading algorithms of non-human intelligence that will rule the world.
AI has begun to drive the world of Deterrence and Warfighting in profound ways. In the Ukrainian & Middle Eastern war theatres, the infusion of AI-powered data analytics has taken the traditional combat domains of intelligence, fire, manoeuvre, targeting, and logistics to a new high. Machine learning-driven decision-making cycles have compressed the OODA loop and target engagement cycles by an order of magnitude. Soldiers/humans are no longer ‘in the loop,’ they cannot influence AI engagement cycles; they can merely oversee combat by being ‘on the loop.’
AI’s integration into military strategies is reshaping conflict, accelerating decision-making, and suppressing engagement cycles, raising concerns about human oversight and algorithmic dominance in combat.
AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE
Each of the aforementioned issues deserves our collective attention and investigation—Chintan and Manthan, so to speak. If the world in the wake of AI is indeed going to be reborn, must/could we endeavour to do so in Indian values and sensibilities? Indian Statecraft may like to explore AI and its many splendour attributes with deep thought and care and develop a distinctly Indian worldview on AI – our destiny in Amritkaal may well ride on our predilections in this regard. It may also be fair to conclude that the problem really is not AI but the human prompt: unless we leverage the many positives of AI (a wave of unprecedented prosperity) with thought and wisdom, we risk getting overwhelmed by its negatives (a destructive tsunami).
Can India rise to the challenge and embrace the AI Moment in human evolution to our collective well-being, one that is also in accord with the Indian National Security Interest?
(Lt Gen Raj Shukla (Retd), former Army Commander and currently a Member of UPSC. The views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The News Analytics Journal.)
