AN ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE OR A SAMARITAN?

Post 2008, the world entered another era of economic instability, and eventually, the established world order started falling apart, after nativist parties came to power on the wave of populism and a vicious hatred against the ‘other’, who was blamed for rising unemployment.

But what nobody talked about was how most of the jobs in the factories were now automated and AI was playing a disruptive role in the traditional way of life. The oil barons had ruled the world since the discovery of oil, but post-2008 and the numerous wars fought in the middle east and the shift to renewables saw the usurping of the power held by the barons and a new technocratic elite emerged which included Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg. Edward Snowden had, however, pulled the curtains of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance programme run by the NSA. The agency had been snooping on the world’s most powerful leaders, its citizens and terrorists.

The Orwellian nightmare slowly unfolded after it was found that every smartphone device, computer or any electronic gadget could be used into a microphone to spy on you. This trend worked in parallel with the emerging autonomous drone technology used for surveillance and combat operations, which was a watershed movement in history. Many detractors had decried the surveillance state while many others banished privacy to the catacombs of society claiming that the technology was to “keep us safe”.

However, with the advent of automated warfare by employing the use of drones, robotic soldiers, the NSA surveillance systems; many feel that the state will use AI to identify detractors ranging from peaceful protestors to hard-line militants in order to eliminate them.

However, the ardent supporters of AI point to the fact that the same systems can be used to effectively identify members of terror outfits, predict crime and help the state to target the top leaders of the outfit without incurring civilian casualties. But one thing was clear that this was the beginning of a new age and we were standing at the tip of the iceberg.

“AI technologies come from countries which are witnessing a demographic disaster. US, Japan and China are cases in point. They now use 3-D printing to print whole houses and human parts and will render demographic dividend obsolete,” says Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department