I write this at a time when the world is aflame with two wars — Russia vs Ukraine and Israel vs Hamas-propelled terrorism from Palestine.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has reported that as of October 8, 2023 there have been a total of 9,806 civilian deaths as a result of Russia’s actions against Ukraine with 17,962 people injured. Without doubt, as the human rights office tells us, the ‘real’ numbers could be higher.
Israeli air attacks on Gaza have left at least 4,200 Palestinians dead and over 12,000 wounded. On the ‘other side’, since the war began, the number killed in Israel has reached 1,400, with 2,800 wounded. This is about the actual theatre of war. Israel’s asking some one million Palestinians to leave northern Gaza ahead of an expected ground invasion of the territory under Hamas control has led the UN to warn Israel that such a mass exodus would be — would be, not could be — “calamitous”.
“Forget about food,” Nebal Farsakh, a Palestinian Red Crescent Society spokesperson, said on October 13, “forget about electricity, forget about fuel. The only concern now is just will you make it, if you are going to live.” The Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Zahar, has chillingly claimed that Israel is just the initial target and that “the entire 510 million square kilometres of Planet Earth” will be under its control.
By the time this column of mine appears in print, we would know how the UN’s warning, its apprehension, and al-Zahar’s claim have shaped. I write this hoping, praying, that the UN’s warnings will be heeded by the four parties in the two wars and by their war-backers so that the dance of death, made so perilous by the nuclear weapons hovering on those wars, abates.
This column today is about our being ready — India and the world being ready — for some fearsome things that we are going to face, inescapably, unavoidably, inexorably.
And they are, to quote Farsakh again, about “… will you make it, if you are going to live.” To adapt her words further, ‘Forget about food, bijli, pani. Forget about the price of petrol, of gas. Think of how you are going to survive. Just that — survive.’
The first threat to our safety concerns Artificial Intelligence — both as a worry and as a wonder.
A Calcutta-based IT professional, young enough to be my son but old enough to have a son of his own, studying for a double-Masters in Europe on ‘History in the Public Sphere’, writes to me to say: “The entire software development industry will not be the same after a few years. Most of the code will not be handwritten but generated by the generative AI models. A large percentage of coders will most likely lose their jobs.”
This is dire.
Are we prepared for that? Will the change take ‘a few years’? Or just about a couple of years? How will that change impact our lives, our security, our very ability to survive?
Codes and coders and jobs apart, is the world ready for the use of AI in global war by State and non-State players? A Reuters report dated October 10 says: “In May, Israeli Defence Ministry Director General Eyal Zamir said the country was on the brink of becoming an artificial intelligence ‘superpower’, using such techniques to streamline decision-making and analysis.” The same report also ponders if Hamas was able to pierce that ‘iron dome’ of Israel’s security with AI-resistant technologies and techniques in its arsenal. Is al-Zahar’s threat an indication that it counts among its allies, AI? And AI being world property now and a global plaything, will other countries and agencies like those based in or working out of Lebanon, Qatar and Egypt use their AI against Israel’s AI, buttressed by NATO’s AI in the coming weeks? Will there soon be something like a war AI and a peace AI — the first hosting and the second halting mass deaths?
The second threat is not about anything artificial. It is about something as real as living organisms.
The jury will never ‘return’ with a clear verdict on whether the Covid-19 pandemic was wholly and ‘innocently’ the work of a self-generative virus or whether some laboratory had a perverse hand in its arising and spread. Both hypotheses need responses. But even if no faceless villain caused it, human arrangements, human mismanagement, human callousness — in other words, all of us — have certainly created conditions for that ‘natural’ arising and spread. Zoonotic disease is bred in the crazy zoo of human inefficiency and ignorance at best and human callousness and greed at worst. There is nothing to show that the world has learnt any long-term lessons from the Covid-19 horrors. India certainly seems to regard the pandemic as gone when its essential core has only taken a weekend off. And that ‘zoo’ flourishes in every town, city, marketplace and abattoir. It thrives in the mindlessness of congregations, rallies. Can AI be used to sense where disease is incubating lethally?
The third threat is also about nature but again, like Covid-19, not only about nature. Human agency, our agency, is involved as well. It has to do with the earth’s crust on which we are situated. The pressure on the Indian Plate has been building up and it requires no seismologist to tell us that the frequency of earthquakes in the higher seismic zones in India is increasing. A Turkey-like quake is more than likely. Nothing can prevent it. But are we prepared for it? Take one look at any of our cities and towns. The way they have grown does not invite earthquakes but it does invite danger when the earthquake occurs. “Ninety per cent of the existing buildings are based on old technology and most of them are non-engineered structures, especially in rural areas,” Major General M.K. Bindal, the former executive director at the National Institute of Disaster Management, ministry of home affairs, has said (PTI, Updated Feb 12, 2023). “It is a massive work to convert the old, non-engineered structures that do not adhere to seismic codes, like in Delhi, to earthquake-proof buildings,” he adds and tells us honestly and scientifically, “a massive exercise is needed to map out each and every existing building (in the high-risk areas).” A tall order. But the challenge is taller. And the more vulnerable for being taller.
But there is great news. We are told, “An AI-driven tool was 70 per cent accurate in predicting earthquakes a week before they happened during a seven-month trial in China, scientists report. The outcome was a weekly forecast in which the AI successfully predicted 14 earthquakes within about 200 miles, or 320 kilometres, of where it estimated they would happen and at almost exactly the calculated strength” (‘Earthquake-predicting tool driven by AI shows 70% accuracy, new research reveals’, PTI, Last Updated: Oct 7, 2023). The international competition was held in China in which the University of Texas (US)-developed AI came first out of 600 other designs. Are we in India going to use AI to prepare us for the earthquakes that seem to be waiting to hit us?
I know nothing of that science but only know that it is more powerful than anything the world has known. Will mastery over it belong to those that wage wars or will it belong to those who wager on peace and its purpose — a planet at peace with itself?
We have never been on the brink of a global catastrophe like this. And we do not seem to realise it.
