The programmers and the programmed
Although the coming decades will see populations shrink in most of the world, the West will experience an existential crisis due to migrants who are unable to assimilate and whose numbers will come to rival the native population at many places. These minorities will eventually challenge the political system and ask to be allowed to live according to their own customs and beliefs.
China and India will have their own unique problems that will impact their economies but they will remain much more uniform culturally.
Politicians naively assume that the migrants will simply dissolve into a creative democratic culture. As we know from epigenetics, cultures have deep roots and conflicts within various ethnic groups are likely to create conditions that are far from ideal for the propagation of civic values. This has already happened in several European with huge spikes in crime, and many migrants seem unable to adjust to the new conditions and remain on welfare.
With three of the four largest economies in Asia, the center of gravity of both population and industry has moved there. But the West will not easily let go of its current hegemonic control. It sees China as its main rival, and it will use all the instruments it possesses to ensure that China does not impact its own hold on power.
India has created very few products and applications that compete with those of the West, and so it is seen as a potential ally by both sides. If and when Indian industry begins to create products that are world-class, they will be acquired by Western companies.
Since the form AI technology takes depends who is doing the programming, the creation of this technology will become an arena of struggle between the great powers.
The domain of AI applications is controlled by the West, and this gives it an edge in influencing the minds of the people the world over. In the information age, one is either a programmer or the user of the programmed product. Perhaps it is not all that different from the age of religion in which products (storyline) that originated at one place became the template for peoples’ lives in other lands.
If the West is doing the programming, its rivals will get programmed. This will happen directly by the products and also in subtler ways where the cognitive systems of individuals will be influenced, not dissimilar to the mind colonization that Britain achieved in India during the colonial period.
Competition and accommodation
Healthy competition between sovereign states is natural, but competition all too often turns into conflict. The historical record shows recurring cycles of interstate violence, particularly between major powers.
Europe’s ongoing war in Ukraine follows the one that took place in the Balkans in of the 1990s. In the Global South, wars have been a part of the normal reality for decades. Many of these wars were initiated or supported by the West for reasons it thought were compelling to protect its interests, but in violation of “rules-based order.”
During the Cold War, the US and the former Soviet Union operated under two separate and distinct political systems connected with each other only at the margins. Although the prospect of mutual destruction tempered the rivalry and eventually led to détente, the aim of each side was for its system to defeat the other.
The US and China are now economically vital, irreplaceable parts of a single global system, intimately enmeshed with each other and the rest of the world by a web of supply chains of a scope and complexity that is historically unprecedented. The economic interdependence of US and China exposes vulnerabilities, which both countries have tried to temper.
Economic linkages imply that America cannot cut itself off from China, politically or economically, however deep its concerns. The Chinese government’s “dual circulation” strategy acknowledges Beijing’s inability to separate itself from the world and its continual reliance on exports. Despite tensions and disruptions, the total volume of US-China trade has remained stable over the past several years. More dramatically, India-China trade has continued to grow in spite of China’s aggressive policy at the border.
The US and China will continue to accept the risks and vulnerabilities of remaining connected to each other. They will compete within the single system of which they are both vital parts. These dynamics are fundamentally more complex than the binary competition that existed during the US-Soviet Cold War.
Within the single system, competition is not about one side destroying or replacing another for that will undermine the entire system and risk grievous self-harm. In such a situation, one must operate so that one’s own vulnerabilities are mitigated and one can exploit the gaps and shortcomings of one’s rival.
The Future of AI
It is clear that AI will result in unique ethical, legal, and philosophical challenges that will need to be addressed. Thus, AI ethics has to deal with the trolley problem, an imagined situation in which one must choose between inactivity in which a runaway trolley kills many on a track if nothing is done and the death of a fewer number of originally “safe” people if the trolley is diverted to another track.
Humans make such ethical choices in both war and peace. For example, the 1943 famine in Bengal, which killed up to 3 million people, occurred because Britain opted to export rice from India to elsewhere for the sake of fortifying the empire during the Second World War. Rice stocks continued to leave India even as Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, was denying urgent requests from India’s viceroy for emergency wheat supplies in 1942–43. Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.[1]
Literally all government policies choose winners and losers but one often ignores the ethical question for it is assumed that humans must make difficult choices and that they are fallible, and that the decisions were made in an atmosphere of uncertainty. The expectation from an AI machine is different, and it will be held legally liable for having caused harmed. In a world of self-driving cars, these are choices that machines and, by extension, their human programmers will need to make.
Regulation of a technology that is constantly evolving by itself and one that not many people fully understand will remain a challenge. It should be sufficiently broad to allow for future evolutions in this fast-moving world and sufficiently precise so as to protect the consumer from its dangerous effects.
Perhaps a universalism that goes beyond the present focus on materialism by giving space to spirituality as a means for self-actualization will be the way for the world to move ahead. The difference between India and the West in dealing with the problem of consciousness is captured in the stories of Icarus and Hanuman.
In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. Icarus and Daedalus were imprisoned by King Minos after Theseus, the enemy of Minos, escaped from the labyrinth. Daedalus created wings for Icarus to escape Crete, but Icarus died when he flew too close to the sun and the wax holding his wings melted. AI is like the wax that joins the wings to the body, but eventually the wax melts.
India has the story of the boy Hanuman who can fly. Once he flies to the sun, thinking it is a fruit, and gets burnt in the face. He is full of mischief taking things from one hermitage and dropping them at another and tired of this the rishis put a curse on him that he will forget that he can fly and this ability will be restored when he is reminded of this power.
The fall of Icarus is the acceptance that we are bound to the ground on which we walk, and are essentially no different from other animals who are guided by instinct. Hanuman’s story points to the ability of everyone to fly and reach the source of light, which is consciousness, the essence of our being. It is good to know that Hanuman’s view is consistent with science.[2]
The ubiquity of AI in all aspects of life will be a time of great estrangement from nature with increasing breakdown of social institutions. The idea that there exists something more than the body will be a source of comfort.
References
[1] J. Barnes, D. Nicholson (eds.), The Empire at Bay. The Leo Amery Diaries. 1929–1945. Hutchinson.
[2] S. Kak, No-go theorems on machine consciousness. Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 10, 237–247, 2023.
