IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (R)AIDING OUR WORLDS, OR NOT ?

Artificial Intelligence was deployed to identify artworks with greater than 98% accuracy comparing the work of Canaletto and Belloto. Using high-resolution images captured from a medium-format camera, Artificial Intelligence used Pictology to train on a homogenous data set with fixed variables, eliminating the need for onerously large data sets that would be difficult to both acquire and curate.

The results were so conclusive that the Organisation using AI was the first to issue the authentication insurance product on paintings. While the implications of the development are profound, the use of artificial intelligence algorithms solve classic problems in art history and attribution - one significant way in which the Organisation distinguished itself from its competitors.

                              Well, the above picture has been AI’'ed to its exceptional form !!

There is a brilliant book by Jack Watling: The Arms of The Future. What he writes is amazing !!

From sensor-fuzzed munitions and autonomous weapons, to ground moving target indication radar, laser vibrometers and artificial intelligence, the weapons of warfare are undergoing a rapid transformation, with modern technologies reshaping how armies intend to fight in the twenty-first century.

The Arms of the Future analyses how the emergence of novel weapons systems is shaping the risks and opportunities on the battlefield. Drawing on extensive practical observation and experimentation, the book unpacks the operational challenges new weapons pose on the battlefield and how armies might be structured to overcome them. At a time when defense spending across NATO is on the rise, and conflict with Russia raises new questions of what it means to fight a truly modern war, Watling examines not just the arms to be employed but how they can be fielded and wielded to survive and prevail in future wars.

Generals across the world were roaring with anticipation the accuracy and lethalness of future wars and immediately took umbrage at the guile of artificial intelligence systems which can set alarm and effectively counter the enemy attack.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical attack described by retired US Marine Corps General David Allen, set on March 18, 2021:

Our captain and his crew had not anticipated the incoming swarm because neither he nor his ship recognized that their systems were under cyber-attack. The undetected cyber activity not only compromised the sensors, but "locked out" defensive systems, leaving the ship almost entirely helpless.

The kinetic strikes came in waves as a complex swarm of drones tore into the ship. It was attacked by a cloud of autonomous systems moving together with purpose, yet also reacting dynamically to one another and to the ship. More than anything the speed of the attack stunned and overwhelmed the sailors. Though the IT specialists on board the ship were able to release some defensive systems from the clutches of the cyber intrusion, the rest of the crew simply didn't have enough decision-making time to react - mere seconds.

In these few seconds, some of the sailors ascertained, with their limited situational awareness, that the enemy's autonomous cyber and kinetic systems were collaborating. But in a matter of minutes, the entire attack was over.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) significantly enhances the ability of radar systems to detect and identify threats in warfare by improving target recognition, automating decision-making, and enabling adaptive threat modelling. 

AI algorithms can process radar data more efficiently than traditional methods, distinguishing between friend and foe, and identifying threats  with greater accuracy. 

Here's how AI assists in radar detection in warfare

AI algorithms, particularly machine learning and neural networks can analyze radar signals to identify and classify targets with greater precision, even distinguishing between different types of vehicles, aircraft, or even individuals. It can learn from past radar data and adapt to changing environments, enabling it to predict potential threats and adjust radar parameters accordingly, enhancing the system's ability to track and engage targets effectively. 

AI can automate routine tasks such as identifying potential threats, prioritizing targets, and initiating responses, freeing up human operators for more complex decision-making. 

It is so versatile that it can combine data from multiple sensors, including radar and other surveillance tools, to create a more comprehensive picture of the battlefield and improve threat detection accuracy and also optimize radar resources by prioritizing tasks, scheduling scans, and adapting radar parameters to changing environments, ensuring efficient and effective operation. 

In essence, AI transforms radar systems from passive detection tools into active and intelligent systems capable of adapting to complex battlefield situations and making real-time decisions to enhance situational awareness and improve the overall effectiveness of military operations. 

The above graph shows how AI controlled warfare aids a plane to evaluate the drones and missiles by sending signals to the pilot to take actions.

The missile, drone, and plane are all tracked by radar, showing different movement patterns and signal changes. The missile and drone show looping movements with their signals peaking when closest to the radar, while the plane flies straight past, with its signals getting stronger as it approaches and weaker as it moves away. These movements and signal strengths are measured using Doppler shifts, signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), and received signal strength indicators (RSSI), which all indicate how close or far these objects are from the radar.

Militaries have for years hired private companies to build custom autonomous weapons. However, Israel's recent wars mark a leading instance in which commercial AI models made in the United States have been used in active warfare, despite concerns that they were not originally developed to help decide who lives and who dies.

The Israeli military uses AI to sift through vast troves of intelligence, intercepted communications and surveillance to find suspicious speech or behavior and learn the movements of its enemies. After a deadly surprise attack by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, its use of OpenAI technology skyrocketed, an Associated Press investigation found. The investigation also revealed new details of how AI systems select targets and ways they can go wrong, including faulty data or flawed algorithms. It was based on internal documents, data and exclusive interviews with current and former Israeli officials and company employees.

“ This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and former senior safety engineer at OpenAI.        

  “ The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.”

As U.S. tech titans ascend to prominent roles under President Donald Trump, the AP’s findings raise questions about Silicon Valley’s role in the future of automated warfare. A leading US tech company expects its partnership with the Israeli military to grow, and what happens with Israel may help determine the use of these emerging technologies around the world.

Mentioning Trump, various studies of Sashi Tharoor rebound many times as he describes Trump a few steps below the grandeur with which the Presidents like Bush, Clinton and Obama held their offices.

Is the American election system faulty or there was no one better than the present incumbent? Words go that Premier Benjamin Netanyahu bolted him to power.   

A puppet Presi ??

The Israeli military’s usage of OpenAI artificial intelligence and software from other renowned companies spiked last March to nearly 200 times higher than before the week leading up to the October 7 attack, the AP found in reviewing internal company information. The amount of data it stored on servers doubled between that time and July 2024 to more than 13.6 petabytes - roughly 350 times the digital memory needed to store every book in the Library of Congress. Usage of  huge banks of computer servers by the military also rose by almost two-thirds in the first two months of the war alone.

Israel’s goal after the attack that killed about 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages was to eradicate Hamas, and its military has called AI a game changer in yielding targets more swiftly.

Since the war started, more than 50,000 people have died in Gaza and Lebanon and nearly 70% of the buildings in Gaza have been devastated, according to health ministries in Gaza and Lebanon.

                             In early days of artificial intelligence the usages were not so brutal !!

The case of Gert Oskam drew both heart ache and happiness at the same time ! A Dutchman, paralyzed at his legs – Gert-Jan Oskam – is now able to walk vibrantly using only his thoughts. The scientific breakthrough happened with the help of two implants that restored communication between the man’s brain and spinal cord, giving him a freedom that he did not have before.

Oskam had been paralyzed at his legs for more than a decade. It happened after he suffered a spinal cord injury during a bicycle accident. Using this new technology, he can now walk naturally, take on difficult terrain and even climb stairs.

The path breaking research on AI combined the spinal implant with the new technology called brain-computer interface. This was implanted above the part of the brain that controlled leg movement. The interface had the ability to decode brain recordings in real time. That allowed the interface designed by researchers at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to work out how the patient wanted to move his legs at any moment in real time.

We take a bow to John McCarthy, the father of artificial intelligence, for introducing us to the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs.

Artificial Intelligence is a way of making a computer, a computer-controlled robot, or a software which thinks intelligently in the same manner the intelligent humans think.

The neural networks are training in more ways to find out how human brain thinks, how humans learn, decide, and work while trying to solve a problem and then use these outcomes to frame the basis of intelligent softwares and systems.

To understand how Gert-Jan Oskam was put into AI we have to take note of how paralysis works.

“ Paralysis occurs when a nervous system is unable to make voluntary muscle movements.”

Uninjured nerves send signals to muscles. Those signals make muscles move. When humans are paralyzed, or have paralysis, they can’t move certain parts of their body. There is a problem with the body’s sensory apparatus and communication system. Normally the nervous system sends signals from the brain throughout the body, telling what to do. If something damages the nervous system, messages can’t get through to muscles.

When AI was introduced into the system of Oskam it created Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to help him.

The inventor of the first neurocomputer, Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, defines a neural network as a computing system made up of a number of simple, interconnected processing elements, which process information by their dynamic response to external inputs.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have the ability to think, re-think and improve upon the responses it has already created based on the external factors!! It will go on changing and improving the network to yield optimum results.

The logic of ANN is based on the belief that working of human brain can be understood by making the right connections and can be imitated using silicon and wires as living neurons and dendrites.

The human brain is composed of 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. They are connected to other thousand cells by axons (picture above). Stimuli from external environment or inputs from sensory organs are accepted by dendrites. These inputs create electric impulses, which quickly travel through the neural networks.

 A neuron can then send (or does not send) the message to other neuron to handle the issue at hand.

The versatility of AI will engulf human kind for ages to come.

Take this brilliant example. We know that every human possesses 23 pairs of chromosomes that are foundations of our DNA curled in a double helix structure.

The demeanour of 22^nd chromosome is puckish, a little impish. It is one of the smallest and arguably one of the most widely discussed of all human chromosomes. In case of blood cancer (leukaemia) the 22^nd chromosome breaks away and curls towards the 9^th chromosome and sits with the 9^th !

The DNA structure gets disturbed and the sitting point gets weak. This creates enough ground for the enzymes to attack the point which leads to profuse multiplication of white blood cells in the bone marrow.

This new chromosome is called Philadelphia chromosome and it contains the fused gene BCR-ABL. This gene is the ABL gene of chromosome 9 juxtaposed onto the breakpoint cluster region of BCR gene of chromosome 22. This fusion creates the hybrid protein tyrosine kinase – often termed as the brutal protein – the cause of cancer.

Artificial Intelligence can play a big role to stem the rot. Every human being does not suffer from cancer. The breakage of chromosome 22 and 9 happens when in specific cases the area of chromosome 9 is by nature weak for target cancer human (nicknamed Ollie, let us assume) as compared to another human (nicknamed Pepe) whose chromosome 9 is relatively stronger in the DNA structure.

What Ollie can do? Ollie can deposit regular DNA samples to a Lab where it is fed to an AI controlled ANN system and the neural computer can actually predict the probability of Ollie’s 9^th getting raided by the 22^nd. The degree of probability (45% or 90%) will help the doctor to start medication even before cancer has stepped in by prescribing medicines which would stop chromosome 22 to sit alongside 9 and create that brutal protein, spelling doom.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of It. AIs have made a big mark in the field of predictive mathematics among others. Take the example of the Poincare Conjecture (conjectures are conclusions or propositions that are proffered on a tentative basis without proof). AI has been able to solve the complex Poincare Conjecture through the Hamilton-Perelman algorithm. It has extensively used the techniques of Ricci Flow.

What is Riici Flow. It describes a continuous deformation of a Riemannian geometry from short distance to long distance. A simple example of a Ricci flow is that starting from a round sphere, the sphere will evolve by shrinking homothetically to a point in definite time. In 1904 Poincare raised the question whether a 3-dimensional sphere holds the same characterisation in dimension-3. It remained unsolved for very long time until Perelman’s mathematics were put into AI structured equations.

AI helped in the study of Black Holes. Here, interestingly, astronomers used machine learning to improve the Event Horizon Telescope’s first Black Hole Image. It helped to understand Black Hole behavior and also helped to test the underlying gravitational theories engulfing the black holes.

Below is the AI aided stunning, high-definition view of M87’s Big Black Hole !!

The other uses of artificial intelligence are to understand the intricacies of Structural Buildings. AI is being used to create more efficient and accurate designs, optimize construction processes, predict and prevent structural failures. Many benefits of using AI in structural engineering, for example, is by automating the design process and focus on more creative and innovative tasks.

And what not!

If we talk about AI, difficulties and impairments, we discuss what happens 100 years from now, the technology will advance to a stage where it will offer equal opportunities and comforts to people with different degrees of difficulties and impairments.

Today, in situations such as natural disasters, the human cost involved in relief work is monumental. With the advancement in AI, robots and drones can potentially reach affected areas and work efficiently and wonderfully saving lives.

Some research suggests that by the year 2125, most of the decisions in life will be taken by AI. The way researchers are thinking, AI would be better trained and better equipped to take professional decisions resulting in a better and safer world.

                                               Humans would be plucked off from real world.

We might as well live in a bubble, in a virtual world surrounded by machines and artilleries never knowing who would my next neighbor be and how I work to survive in my own bubble.

                                                  Machines would be taking lot of human jobs.

Many of the human jobs would be taken over by robots. Human creativity would be at its lowest. The man-machine friendship would die and one would not be surprised if robots created by humans start annihilating humans. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI and creator of ChatGPT is optimistic when he says AI will create new jobs but some old ones may die fast.

By the year 2125, future will be way different than we can see and imagine currently. With such great advancements in technology - automated cars, space travels and what not it would be interesting to note how humanity would respond under these troubled circumstances. Constantly interacting with machines would make us machines(?), how our children would adapt, whether marriages would be between two machines(?). Will humans would still be humble and polite or be cruel and ravenous?

A basket of worries !!

Time will tell.

On the contrary, times ahead could be much better than what we have now, the times we never imagined would come to us!!

Disclaimer : In selective areas of the article fictional characters are depicted.