Metapolitics

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 be pursuing AGI is in some respects a little ill concerting as this has a metapolitical component - it agrees implicitly that AGI is great, it only differs on in whose custody it is indeed really great. 

 

Perhaps it is too early to speculate over how the computing and communication technologies have altered, or could alter, the size and quality of a state's political organization. Political organizations unfortunately are not software, you cannot simply download an upgrade to patch some issues and load even more additional features and functionalities. People will experience anxieties when structural changes lead to institutional changes, some of them will resort to violence, and then that violence will become a negotiation tactic for the politician. This. Happens. Everytime. In that sense the people are also a strategic dummy.  

 

Davidson & Rees-Mogg predicted that the computing and communication revolution would cause organized predatory violence to slip out from central control, and everyone except politicians will benefit from the death of politics. But they have their biases, I have mine. In August 1991, the hard-line coup plotters couldn't shut down Yeltsin's communications in Moscow because he had just acquired a cool new technology - the mobile phone. The history consistently suggests that computing and communication technologies have largely benefited the politicians. Carroll Quigley, writing in Weapons Systems and Political Stability, approached technologies in terms of their defensive/offensive nature - suggesting more that offensive power means larger, more intense political organization. Unfortunately, he died before his book could reach the computing age. Artificial Intelligence for example, could be described as a centralizing force, but a technology like that could hardly be assessed as inherently offensive or defensive. How will it then affect the political organization of modern nation-states if instead of the Deep Minds and the OpenAIs of the world, a nationalized organization happens to be the first one to develop AGI? 

 

Most of us live in a security bubble detached from the blood and gore of war, but it takes not long for things to slip back - Bosnia and plenty other places have proven time and again that the law is a consensus and no consensus lasts long enough to become The Law. That is why even if we hate them passionately, society needs politicians to negotiate that consensus on behalf of the crowd. Would an AGI make any difference to this, I can't really say. And about that AGI, well, its uncertainty is not the same as its low probability. The actual nature and requirements of AGI are yet to be discovered and its behaviors are yet to be added. Perhaps yet another job post seeking software architects with 108 years of ML experience needed for "extensible design" is in the works.

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.

On the utility of crisis-gaming AI risks

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 points, it is an exceptionally useful tool when it comes to tackling a very specific kind of problems - where you need to not predict actions but rather anticipate the outcomes and consequences of actions. Because rationality doesn't work well with incomplete information, a lot of predictive research methods don't always work well for these kind of problems either. As forecasters say, quantification is useful but wisdom is more useful.

Anyways, system engineering principles suggest that it is best practice to build those components first which are most likely to fail or cause failure, so let us first look at the caveats generally associated with wargaming: 

Reproducibility
A bit like the game of chess. While a bunch of independent games may proceed differently, they'd cause over time and iterations the general characteristics inherent in the game to emerge clearly. Wargaming is experimental, but not strictly an experiment. If we approach it as a simulation as it is, the lack of micro-level reproducibility turns out to be a feature and not a bug. 

Rare Events
But a catastrophic risk is infact a very rare event. And the thing about such risk scenarios is that everything is chaotic and nobody knows the truth. Thus gamification based exercises in this context will only simplify reasoning about system behavior, so when the crisis actually happens, decision-makers can navigate the chaos without acting from a point of anxiety and fears. 

Players Matter Too Much
Yes. This is indeed the biggest constraint which will shape how we design our game. Player expertise is paramount and it is best to design a game which explores questions relevant to those expertise. And gaming a crisis is not easy to do, especially without player commitment and appropriate preparations. So game designers and institutions need to atleast agree upon a baseline player capability.     

A basic how-to-go-about gaming crises

In a large sociotechnical environment, sometimes reliable systems can have unreliable components. Identifying those components requires us to develop conceptual models of interaction in that environment. This is exactly what wargaming does, it would reduce the strategic indeterminacy which burdens the AI risk governance efforts. I mean chaos engineering is nice and useful, but mission-critical systems involving intelligent robotics or autonomy and cyberspace need to be as deterministic as possible.

In coming days, edge robots would not only need to gather and store but also trend, time-series, and analyse their data. They would also have their own CI/CD peculiarities. As it is even today, old components in complex legacy products are not easy to replace as there often are third-party microcontrollers and actuators which are no longer in production. Gamification can help us find those weak links. It can also help decision-makers conceptualise differently, for example helping high-level politicians and planers better understand swarms as interoperating IoT instances and not just as lots of flying drones.

Slide from a presentation by Anja van der Hulst, research on forecasting crisis decision making behavior suggests role-play simulations outperforms other methods 

Mainly the main rationale for gamification is to discover structure of solutions - what elements are relevant for policy decisions, what unknown relations exist between these elements, how do player motivations arise and shift, how do actors (and agents) interact, what are the influences of time and exertion etcetera and so on. The Formula-1 teams for example make a really good use of simulations to harden safety. They simulate the vehicle and all its components in almost a digital-twin like fashion, running containerized virtual systems. These simulations reduce time-intensive testing and provide a good cognitive model for engineers and managers to confront unexpected failures. The AI risk community at present is anyways mostly concerned with the hypothetical impacts of statistical mistakes. Crisis-gaming is great for just that sort of thing.

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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Cautious Quadrilateralities

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 geostrategic priorities. So understandably (with some hindsight) while we might want to avoid symmetrical competition with an obviously bigger opponent and focus on emerging capabilities which could break an established stalemate and provide sustainable asymmetric advantages to constrain CCP actions in future. Delhi and even Dharamshala both understand this very well, after all. And other than the slowly simmering borders and periodic geo-economic swings, India also has a bit of a civilizational obligation to herself that Asia doesn't turn into a CCP fiefdom.

Under this kind of environment, there has lately been a resurgence and expansion of the old US-JP-AU-IN HADR (The Quad) alliance which in itself is a center of varied interests owing to its strong political proximity with maritime dominance and the welfares originating from a post-pandemic diversification of China based supply chains. There have even been some efforts to promulgate the idea that this arrangement is not against China. In all honesty, unless China itself joins the mix, any attempts to regulate the security of Indo-Pacific waters will have to take on a character which faces China as the opponent. This is a bit of a Tolstoyan case of the fate of nations being independent from the individual wills of their kings and ministers.

That said, there are valid reasons to reconsider the strategic utility of institutionalizing these emerging structures. Japan is a treaty-based US ally. Australia is a US ally which with RCEP is unlikely to break from an economic dependence on China. The US of course, is the incumbent politico-military arbiter of liberal world order. None of these shares a land boundary with or has massive trigger-happy territorial disputes with China. We do. But the quadrilateral isn't about India, it is about "Indo-Pacific". And that thick line needs more policy thickening, because given West's ideological and economic competition with China, it can be easy to surmise that the IOR or the Indo aspects of Indo-Pacific will recieve less attention than the Pacific aspects. Besides, a third of the worldwide maritime trade passes through the South China Sea that is being contested over, and the Chinese aren't exactly going to accept some fancy rules based order in strictly diplomatic manners.

It can also be expected that more and more states joining this arrangement will still try to maximize their relational benefits while minimizing the individual costs even if that isn't in the grander strategic interests of the arrangement itself. It is well known that specific goal oriented coalitions with clear objectives are better than a general-purpose bloc riding-the-waves of international waters. The military incentives here rest with the former, or in very localized regional arrangements between states trying to order their own backyards. Unless there are strong political and economic incentives, no one is going to make commitments of manpower and resources for expeditionary operations to defend foreign interests. So it can be fairly argued in this case that expansion for sake of expansion, while gaining more legitimacy in the eyes of public and possibly even some international institutions, would tend to dilute the coalitionary maritime defense potential unless carefully guarded against.

China too is aware of the possible maritime encircling and will focus on global economy to find its way out. Consequently it has revamped its foreign investment regime and launched a slew of techno-economic armamentarium including the central bank's digital currency which could in future help in renminbi internationalization, generating non-trade currency demands, and in getting the CCP a hold over China's burgeoning money networks and perhaps over the slippery oil shores as well. Considering 'all the things that need consideration' maybe the best way to think about the current stratagems is to affirmatively rephrase Derek Walcott that the sea is indeed the history.

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 Rewards

"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 this could be a bipedal robot figuring out the use of his hands when the walk involves a steep climb by imitating what it observes in other agents, biological and otherwise. As it is, in swarm the most critical information is always coming from the nearest agents which are also considered to be the most reliable. In humans at least, learning does not always lead to a permanent change of behavior, expectation of rewards and fear of punishments often puts us onto the path of overlooking or even misinterpreting our learnings. Yet while the discovery of which response leads to what effect goes far beyond just observations, observational learning is said to be the most prominent method of learning. It should be evident therefore that the attention control mechanism and a hyper-sensitive selection of stimulus and response can make the difference between a satisfactory outcome and the optimal one.

Unlike naturally occuring intelligence, Artificial Intelligence gets its teeth mostly from nurture, as 'nature' mostly applies to its embodiment and hardware limitations. The case of human multitasking is an interesting study in the nurturing of intelligent behavior. A productive use of downtime fetches a much higher reward value than leisure and inertia. We have effective attention mechanisms to cope with long & complex inputs, we apply controlled attention and carry out continuous switching between tasks to maximize rewards. Our perceptual motor expertise gets better with the task familiarity and an economic attentional distribution is then either always rewarded or is at least never punished. More than that, we consistently acquire new goals and build a hierarchy of goals (correlating with hierarchy of needs) which helps us to multitask better and organize our time and life towards greater reward expectancy.

Now if we are to have agents with the ability to acquire new goals on their own, operating under a predetermined hierarchy of goals based on a cause-effect relationship, AI will need a more purposeful nature of being which risks an even willful acceptance of punishments (or negative rewards) towards the greater goal. A finer sentiment sensitivity, a clear demarcation between mission-specific-sensing and non-mission-specific-sensing, and a causality based actuation that draws from dynamic sets of rules seems to be the way forward.

Any finite set of rules, as frames and boxes generally go, is bound to provide an incomplete approximation of reality. As some philosophers have noted, instinct is the most intelligent among all forms of intelligence, and it is least bound by the concerns and deliberations of rewards and punishments as compared to the non-instinctive actions. With more and more seamless and direct coupling of perception to action and an incomplete knowledge-base like humans, sometimes agents too, like humans, can run into a quagmire best described by a remark which Napoleon had made after losing the war in Russia, that, between the sublime to the ridiculous is one short step. Bonne Guerre.

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