Rethinking GIS

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 kilobytes. It maybe somewhat questionable to some, but we need to put the GIS’ software and hardware infrastructure at the very centre of a technology centric foreign policy and not at the peripheries of a shy and reticent overture towards being a global power. 

Some key recommendations:

• Build regional cooperation over co-developing GIS assets and regional mapping capabilities, this would go a long way in redefining the nature of our neighbourhood.

• Inter-governmental programs around GIS thus would also take own geography into account, meaning enhanced regional outreach of developmental programs using access, interoperability, and portability centric solutions.

• We have to develop a horizontal and non-hierarchical work ethic in the organisations tasked with radical technical innovation, especially in the satellites-sensors-software triangle. It has worked wonders for many, it will be good for us too.

• In the spirit of previous point, we need to create and globally promote open-ended and open-access GIS technology designs and standards. This cannot be done without seamless cooperation with academia and industry.

• Again, in the spirit of previous point, the government needs to jointly develop a framework with the academia and GIS industry to enable them to independently pursue joint R&D goals with their counterparts in other countries.

• We need to formulate a national data standardisation policy, which includes geo-tagging of all data objects in commercial as well as government sector. This way the existing information infrastructure can be easily transformed into a GIS based developmental and strategic platform.

• Related to above point over standardisation, there should be a single source of “analysis ready” GIS data which can cut down painstaking data preparation, standardisation and fusion pipeline on the user side. Perhaps a cloud-native ML based geospatial processing service could help monitor and facilitate the whole thing.  

• Whatever it takes, including stealthy reverse engineering or building edge AI capabilities into orbital platforms, we’ve to aggressively push Indian GIS capabilities to a level where it can be turned into a non-negotiable aspect of any joint space missions. 
  

Today the information acquisition costs are relatively democratised, what is wanting is the capacity building to augment the existing service based industries with earth observation. That would not only provide the impetus for the creation of a homegrown Indian earth observation industry, but also enable the strategic thinking to integrate the vagaries and vulnerabilities of our existence and its environment into how we run our geopolitics and strategic security.

Afterall the slowly evolving physical infrastructure of the internet, along with GIS assets on space and ground, and technologies like Artificial Intelligence – are forming the landscape of a new kind of territory where the pecking order has not yet been fully established. And therefore constructing India’s strategic interests as firmly embedded into the machine needs to go from perhaps an engineering problem to a political solution.

The Narcissism of Technical Differences

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 free-speech. Which brings us to the subject of export controls, dual-use emerging technologies, and legacy international institutions.

 

Technology Export & Information

 

Export-control in itself is an old and important tool of statecraft, serving economic as well as military functions. However the present dichotomous classification of technologies based on military and non-military usage is severely outdated and in fact only holds-up when dealing with conventional weapons. AI in itself isn't a weapon but an enabler and having AI-superiority proves hugely advantageous when extending general capabilities across all kinds of defense systems and platforms, giving the machine learning software-stack and hardware accelerators a strong military utility.  

To deal with the problematic usage of such dual-use technologies, the most prominent international regime is the Wassenaar Arrangement. The arrangement, with respect to its fundamental role of helping to prevent the malicious use of technology, is pretty ineffectual when it comes to Artificial Intelligence and its ICT based applications. The de-territorializing effects of cyberspace present a clear institutional, regulatory, and compliance gap, where arrangements like Wassenaar only end up imposing yesterday’s standards over tomorrow’s technology. For example the first time when Wassenaar was invoked, it targeted software during the 90s to stop international adoption of cryptographic techniques over things like e-mail communications. That turned out to be a lot more than just diplomatic failure.  

And Wassenaar isn't the only international regime facing difficulty with technological changes. The MTCR (Missile Technology Control Regime) for example has been updated to include long range UAVs and will need future changes sooner than later. It must be made clear that these controls do not work as intended. There is always great difficulty in enforcing contracts in emerging markets, there is an ever-present tradeoff between transparency and secrecy, and moreover in an environment of deception the compliance can not be truly verified even if states bring (they do) their own technical means of verification. This is a grand version of what game theorists call a POSG (Partial Observation Stochastic Game), really fascinating and quite intractable stuff.

A classic legend, of dual-use exploiting institutional ambiguities, sitting in the ruins of a medieval empire

Scholars have duly noted the inherent ambiguity in Wassenaar Arrangement, especially when dealing with intangible dual-use technologies. There is no consensus on whether the arrangement could adapt to technologies which are both socioeconomically foundational and militarily significant, without ironically turning itself into a dual-use multilateral instrument of coercive and economic statecraft. Such concerns are not unfounded in international politics, take for example when in 1993 the Americans got the Russians to cancel the transfer of cryogenic technologies to India in exchange for some US-Russia space cooperation. Software being fundamentally information, presents more compounded challenges for export controls given the largely unregulated flow of information across borders. Basically the trouble being that if you put sanctions over the export of fishes to someone, failing to prevent him from learning to fish is a foreign policy failure. Not surprisingly therefore, a recent US AI-policy report which declared advertising-technologies as "NatSecTech", contained that "Export controls should be utilized... to slow competitors’ efforts to develop indigenous industries in sensitive technologies with defense applications... (by) targeting discrete choke-points."

Proliferation & The Undefined

 

The Mahabharat is absolutely filled with instances of specialized and more devastating tools being limited-by-distribution to only select few, though those familiar with the text would concur that this non-proliferation regime did little to control privileged actor behavior and eventually an utterly morbid devastation followed up. Multilateral export control regimes today pursue a deterrence by denial framework towards global security. However, in case of ICT based goods when export controls suppress economic interests, proliferation shifts to a black market, even between member states, on shady darknet sites.

It takes no genius to see that legally binding restrictions on AI capabilities will be economically debilitating, so it is going to be really hard to enforce sovereignty over technology or even know which exact technologies to control. Let us consider a hypothetical scenario: Most of the power consumption (>90%) in AI operation happens due to what can be described as "data movement operations" — adjusting features, weights, biases, transferring intermediate results etc — so it is understandable that a better power management technique/toolkit could make the systems significantly more energy efficient. Now consider that in a not-too-distant future these computations are happening in autonomous edge devices fielded on both sides amid a lengthy military standoff in a remote inhospitable region such as the deserted upper reaches of the Himalayas. Would an innovative intangible power model here be treated the same way an advanced battery technology is treated? What if someone strategically open-sources it?

 

Neural Network Power Consumption

Given that even technologies used today in public transportation, agriculture and pollution monitoring, such as LIDAR and hyperspectral tracking, will be very easily directed to military usage; several researchers have suggested to use the phrase "omni-use" to describe AI and other related emerging ecosystem. It should be clear to whomsoever-it-may-concern that they cannot control the flow of omni-use intangible items and neither can it be ascertained decidedly what or from who an omni-use technology must be kept. In an area like this, traditional controls will only bring about shadow regulations and more of other unsavory economics.

 

Way Forward, Institutional Corrigibility

 

Most countries with strong R&D focus prefer their weapon-systems to be approached as black-boxes, not to be reversed engineered or subjected to exhaustive component analysis. On another side, in future insurgencies and urban conflicts, we could be seeing a lot of improvised weapon systems which utilize open-source and low cost OTS components, those which would just not be regulated with current approaches. What technologies are available to militaries greatly guides how societies evolve and technologies also have a tendency to become more efficient relatively quickly because of their near-constant evolutionary cycle of adaptation and reinvention. It is therefore fitting and important to have a better and continuous coupling with all stakeholders, and not get carried away by media headlines, trends and lobbying.

So building Institutional Corrigibility in our context can be thought of as designing mechanisms to facilitate objective stakeholders (from academia and industry) bring necessary outside correction in transgovernmental networks responsible for developing and implementing technology export controls. The multilateral international institutions must understand the difference between essential system complexity and accidental system complexity, and work every bit to minimize and first and obliterate the second.
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Fail Securely

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 the context of lethal autonomous systems. 

Exploitation surface of a generic ML pipeline

Given the increasingly diverse exploitation routes, the prevailing ideas suggest to have a well trained human operator who is periodically assessing whether an AI is misinterpreting its environment. But conventional human-in-the-loop mechanisms are ill-suited to handle spatiotemporal complexity. Consider for example a large number of potential targets in a tough or no geography and an extremely compressed timeline for making engagement. In this situation it is simply not feasible for the AI to refer back to the human operator every time an engagement has to be made.

If adapted suitably, the old concept of kill-boxes may produce a simple socio-technical solution to the problem of how to detach from conventional human-in-the-loop and embrace independent decision-making in military AIs while still keeping the operator to monitor incoming data. It is also in line with the existing cyber-security principles of network segmentation and granting access based on user's role/location/time etc.

By not wholly depending upon autonomous systems' ability to interpret context and limiting its "full-fledged use" within a human generated spatiotemporal compartment i.e. a kill-box, we would not only impart the AI operation a human-like non-zero probability of making high risk "alpha zero" moves, but also allow more secure failures that cannot exacerbate the larger conflict while providing all the benefits of deploying advanced autonomous technology. This is especially valid for the global-common type environments like the space and the ocean, and of course the internet too; where there is further need to research and manage AI security risks as most nations in such environments are virtually in a persistent struggle with their allies and adversaries simultaneously. 

A typical conventional kill-box. (image source: WikiLeaks)

Ideally, a military should develop its own autonomous systems instead of relying on commercial off-the-shelf products or even allies' systems for those may come with their own inductive biases and are sometimes less likely to fully support complex missions. There are obvious economic, organizational and foreign policy incentives for doing this. And most importantly it would let the machine behavior policy and AI failures be much more clearly defined and adversarially trained against in a manner that does away with insecure failures while also suiting the respective country's cultural sensibilities.

Speaking of latter, complex societies require a fair amount of organized coercion, socioeconomic incentives, cultural deterrence and mutation over a course of centuries to become eligible for the "civilization badge". So it should be natural to want your AIs to reflect those civilizational ethos. Understandably culture isn't an engineer's problem but the way technology (particularly ICT) accords vastly different modes of social interactions and restructures social and even political affairs, it sets the premise for engineering which can function as 'politics by other means'. Perhaps Kaczynski was right. And that's all the more reason to develop systems that embrace failures, and fail securely.

Coalitions & AI

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 alliances have the bulk of their operational interoperability challenges resulting from the diversity of doctrines, military technologies and soldiers’ skill-levels. Addition of Autonomous Weapons and Systems (AWS) greatly increases the already substantial operational complexity of these by introducing some major considerations into the alliance relations, chiefly:

THE DATA RIGHTS -
As the experiments with self-driving cars have shown, unlike the human soldiers, AWS will produce and collect huge amounts of multidimensional data, and there are obvious disputes about who’d have access to that data. The data will be of the external environment, also the AWS’ interaction data (with that environment and with other AWS including those of Allies and Non-Allies), the local learning and processing data, data on anomalies/lagging and security/cybersecurity incidents etc. These would present broader knowledge on the conflict and capabilities, and a picture which could be very useful to military planners and intelligence community. Because a lot of such data will be collected privately by autonomous agents, there are not just significant opportunities to achieve mutually beneficial sharing agreements between governments and organizations but also a whole new layer of interaction/information games between states. 

CONTESTED C3 - 
Related to who gets what data rights, is the matter of command arrangements. Decision-making, ethical guidelines, and operational procedures could differ significantly across allies when it comes to cyber-physical autonomous multi-agent systems. Therefore AI systems present a very different set of problems in alliances’ command & communication design. This also presents an opportunity for those nations which have better C3 infra and multilateral options of integration to take the upper-hand in setting the terms of the security cooperation.

BYZANTINE AI -               
The autonomous agents which display arbitrary, faulty, or malicious behavior are termed as Byzantine AI. These could be the result of enemy exploitation also. The management of such resources in an alliance requires special attention and creation of formal procedures, quick consensus mechanisms, and channels of risk communication to interact and intervene, including on behalf of allies, while avoiding any claims of mutual interference. For an example of bad interference, recently Tesla remotely turned-off the autopilot of a customer’s vehicle because some payment wasn’t made, such "security features" may have drastic consequences in armed conflicts, and so far we’ve been lacking a valid governance framework for managing byzantine assets. 

RESOURCE PROTECTION -
Assuming that most wars wouldn’t be a decisive all-out armageddon but follow some sort of political nash-equilibria and that today’s friends can turn into tomorrow’s foes, there emerge some concerns regarding maintaining certain elements of competitive advantage over your allies. There need to be modalities of ML process and intrasystem communication protection, development of mutually-agreed upon safety testing tools, and architectural modularity in the systems deployed, among probably many other things. Further work in modularity and resource protection mechanisms in an alliance would not just help solve the immediate interoperability challenges of a man-machine force, but also take us a step in the direction of being able to address the problem of technology/equipment life-cycle.

Clearly, one player signals too much.

There is a growing body on research in AI alignment which addresses the issues related to cooperation failures, AI’s lack of evolutionarily established signalling mechanisms, approaches for joint optimization, and open-source interactions between AI systems of asymmetric capabilities. All of which should be the top AI safety research questions for states looking to go deploy AI for security related tasks with their allies. And give the fact that most of these tasks are going to be actuated via edge devices, further expansion of security anti-patterns is needed in context of multi-agent learning systems.

Since AI integration is an inevitable and irreversible process, hopefully international alliances would churn out (or adopt) a framework which finds wider applicability across the spectrum of cooperation-competition activity. Also what promptly comes to mind is Napoleon’s somewhat ironic remark that if he must make war, he’d prefer to do it against a coalition. Which is still very relevant, even for security engineers and foreign policy wonks.  

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Sadbuddhi in Sets

"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 misplaced gut while being constrained with overanalysed choices. The agency of 'constrained maximizers', not necessarily always as rational as in the western conception, has its students in the arena of conflicts beyond the chess board, rooted in its potential for both serendipity as well as misfortune. A Machiavellian adage therefore rightly suggests that true prudence consists in knowing how to distinguish the character of troubles and in the choice to take the lesser evil. In Yogic philosophy there is a word for that, Sadbuddhi, referring to developing the much touted virtue of timely knowing the right thing to do - arguably resolving the groupthink/polythink syndromes that beset most decision making units. This writing is inclined to touch upon political culture and the decision making therein, so we'll follow the lens of intra-species aggression. And although coalationary intra-species aggression spans our non-relatives too, from lions and wolves to even numerous ant species among others, we'll stick to apes likes us.

The term "political culture" itself is recent, though the practices have existed throughout. Like humans, chimpanzees too have a coalationary psychology — that is an inclination to form closely structured groups/ecosystems with strategic hostility toward outgroups, and sometimes even outliers. Other than cooperation, reciprocity and role division - the division of meat and other resources among chimps follows a process of sharing in which power, sex, and violence tend to interact in rather human ways. So different groups of chimps in their territories end up having very different behaviours and social customs, developing different kind of tools and manifesting different communication mechanisms thusly. Reductionism it is, but a chimp order rises with its own crude geopolitics.

The human society too, going by Dunbar's logic, functions in sets of humans. The successful sets have and attract more members (Roman allies rebelled in 80s BC not for secession but for overt Roman citizenship), while losing few to others. This is compounded by the networked nature of an information society. Yet these sets and their members, like those of chimps, never function outside the laws of direct or indirect reciprocity towards each other i.e. I'll help you but when we meet again then you help me. This basic evolutionary dynamics makes Proportionality perhaps the only natural law of war, and other conflicts between sets.

Basis 'Proportionality', the nuclear MAD doctrines would appear as optimized bluffing, for all WMD may be CBRN weapons but not all CBRN weapons are WMD, but that discussion is for another day. As it is, all such interpretations, by nature of self-interest, are biased and susceptible to 'syndromes of the self' i.e. self-deception and self-centeredness. Coming back, it is safe to say that the set-membership nature of society causes, especially in the conditions of present degree of connectedness, an evolving instance of political boundary setting, from physical boundary to the ideological ones shaping member identities.

Basic Structural Coupling

It is well known, that for a system to stay "alive" it must preserve its identity. Though since the gap between perception and reality is also a socio-psychological threat surface, the system must keep maneuvering the environment around it and be fluid enough to evolve along. In the age when goal setting of AIs is termed not an engineering but a political problem, the notions of 'structural coupling' between systems and environment therefore apply equally to political cultures as well. An advice from John Boyd "the maneuverist" suggests decision makers to approach people, ideas, and machines — in that order. However the how-to of such abstractions remains subject to systemic pressures and some degrees of operational and organisational elusiveness, often threatening a conceptually devolving set.

Pursuing a Systemic Sadbuddhi thus becomes a matter of acting on and perceiving reality without letting our beliefs be colored by our desires (and fears), and as Robert Jervis has recommended, making our 'Assumptions, Beliefs, and Predictions' explicit and inquisitory, for it underlines that the predictions are always resting on some assumptions. Taking human society as a whole, the present chimp world order reflects the inertia of the predominant last great war positions. As the economic center-of-gravity shifts from Atlantic to the Pacific and technology gives chimps men equalizing effects over adversaries, how the decision makers of resource constrained competing sets battle it out remains to be seen. One thing is evident though that usually he who would pay the piper, historically speaking, will call the tune.

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Misdirections & The Internet

"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 the real thing. Perception is constructive, following a predictive processing framework, which underlies why illusions occur. But our intent here is not to talk about magic, we'll do that some other time. Here we want to talk about the sometimes coercive influencing of perceptions, the skillful tunneling of our attention, the actors who may use that and the overarching cyber-enabled theater of these tricks.

Our actors may be groups/activists/hackers/guerillas/state/non-state/whatever with a political or reformist agenda. As per their situation, they may or may not use other and often more violent means of action. Our theater can be better conceptualized as a multi-agent system where each agent (actor) always maintains some local state carrying a representation of all the information which the actor has access to. Capabilities drive the actor intentions, but cultural ideologies, psychological and sometimes monetary benefits, as well as network externalities are primary drivers of behavior in this "theater".

There is emerging a lot of material on Russian and Chinese disinformation as well as hacking campaigns, it is arguable that this "material" itself is a countering mechanism of sorts. We don't know lots for sure so let us take another example, from the epic Mahabharat, day 15 of the Kurukshetra war. This because of two reasons, first that no one can object to the truth or falsehood of a mythology, and second, it makes a great example since we can see various elements of coercive influence operations in a single instance.

At the conceptual level, we can see multiple information classes and the leveraging of unique channel characteristics, also a great display of how an influential node can amplify emotions or curb resistance while building greater trust. There are different communication & influence paths, with a continuous notion of bombardment frequency and intensity. The core of disinformation was repeated thrice to Drona by different actors, while changing the nature of appeals with lots of fighting in between. This while the "celestials" were driving Drona's emotions and reasoning away from fighting, there is coinciding improvisation of inducement strategy throughout the operation. And most importantly from a cyber-driven perspective there is fake-forensics (dead elephant) to avoid inconsistency and leave a false trail backed by true evidences, which also allows for plausible deniability as well as perceptual ambiguity towards any bad self-knowledge among actors. Everything from indirect incitements to direct actions, interactions are directed towards the overall operational objective of attacking Drona's willingness to continue fighting by having him distracted and occupied with a falsehood.

The great strategist and the diplomatic finesse of neither fighting nor not-fighting. Image©watchalen

It is well known in general warfare, the general superiority of defense over attack, all things being equal. And even though military strategy is the domain of taking on the stronger opponent and taking on a weaker persistent opponent is what politicians were for, the advent of cyber-enabled operations has somewhat upended the traditional notions, including but not limited to the ideas of proportionality. David Deptula, when talking about armed drones once, noted that an actor can now project power without projecting vulnerability. This maximization of projected power while minimizing the projected vulnerability and the borderless quasi-intangible nature of cyber-enabled information operations, is markedly the defining shift in the conduct of war, arguably somewhat more threatening to the open-internet societies than the ones behind the firewalls.

Nevertheless, for big-brothers with many eyes, intelligence over internet traffic and telecommunications is only the baseline of information gathering. And with greater state capabilities, come innovations from the underground also. We are seeing ideological actors coordinating as leaderless and self-organizing trans-national networks, using less tech and even riding on international relations. Such systems (of networks) over time can become somewhat fault tolerant & resilient to a degree, if the environment is not shaped against them.

Sometimes actor actions can be attributable, but sometimes not attributable, and sometimes even misattributed. It is difficult to set expectations from future engagements if the prominent actions are a misdirection. With a leaderless system architecture comes the autonomy of peripheral attacks which puts the spotlight back over plausible deniability and perceptual ambiguity. We may see strategic shifts as stable actor behavior in such environments, even leveraging of crises and critical political events to widen any sense of distrust, doubt, disagreement and disarray among the adversary.

Come what may, our unconditional security proofs often rest over idealized assumptions. These illusions of security prevent us from making systemic changes. This may range from us not upgrading our vulnerable devices to our dear leaders overlooking contiguous societal necessities, like climate change for example. This is a pervasive human folly, we like the browsing experience so we don't turn off the JavaScript. And there is no best solution to this but akin to much of Sun Tzu tapestry is a Bruce Lee solution, be like water, LOL.

On Formlessness

“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 modern nation-states too are like the man, and therefore Cebrowski and Garstka have rightly remarked that they make war the same way they make wealth.

In 18^th century, Pierre-Joseph Bourcet had conceptualized the war machine as something which flows. This fluidity, he had remarked, was essential and directly proportional to this machine’s maneuverability.

Discussions on warfare must begin with the minds that conduct the conflict. Though there are many aspects of the mind, the psychological property which concerns us most is Intelligence, for that alone primarily concerns displaying advantageous behavior over competition. Wars are won by superior decisions, and better intelligence breeds better decisions.

It is said that intelligence evolved in the ocean when a tiny bag of saltwater known today as a neuron, sparked of electric current upon facing danger. This meta-primitive event gives a very thorough insight into the phenomenon of war for it marks the beginning of the precarious relationship between hunting, warfare and survival, also producing an insight into the perpetuity of war.

Man fought with and alongside horses and elephants, and now he fights alongside machines. Hobbes had said, it is every man against every man. That is his nature after all, that of a competitive animal - from which arises the need to cooperate, giving him his social nature. This self-competing attribute also leads to the adaptive and evolutionary nature of his intelligence.

Assuming that war is the engine which makes the state, the state deploys a system using which it can execute this “formlessness” - or rather a system of systems that allows reconnaissance, manipulation, denial and retaliation. Very much how any self-preserving and self-interested entity would function.

War making is an existential enterprise and utterly devastating to say the least, but even man’s search for meaning goes a lot into why having meaning is important, he does not simply stop himself at the threat of destruction. The ruminations of military philosophers have taught us that the more destructive a military action the less strategic it is, to the extent that it is safely hypothesized that the art-and-craft of war lies in pursuing victory while causing minimum harm.

Formlessness, as some say, is the way that causes the least harm.