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A
I regard this as a massive new dimension of geopolitical warfare, dividing the populations. And it works. There's always been propaganda, and propaganda was used both to persuade the population and in a different way to confuse commanders at the other side. So false information is a fundamental dimension of geopolitics. So that's not new for me. What's radically new is the technology that's available. And what that allows you to do is something that couldn't be done before. Before the United States was very good at this sort of information warfare. We'll call that. We had the Voice of America. We had Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe seemed to many Hungarians in 1956 to be saying that if you rise up against the Russians, we will come to your aid. It didn't actually say this, but the Hungarians interpreted. It rose up based on that. But they knew who was sending that information and they knew it was Radio Free Europe because they understood the voice that was speaking to them. There was some one person who spoke Hungarian to the Hungarian public and it was very difficult to fake it. What the Internet gives us is anonymity. We do not know who is speaking. And I have written about this as a very dangerous thing. The founders of the country guaranteed free speech. That meant that the state could not control speech. It was assumed, however, that social forces would limit speech because the people around them were not limited in what they could do to people who spoke both falsely and wickedly and so on and so forth. The Internet is a place in which no responsibility can be taken and in fact the identity can be hidden. You could appear to be something other than you are, and therefore, in principle, you can be a Chinese or a Russian or an Iranian speaking as if you were an American. Accents aren't there, the voices aren't there. And it's that it is technically possible to create an Internet that will require social responsibility that identify you. It will always be possible, always to make phony football phone calls and everything, but it would not be perfect. But there be elements that could be done. The nature of this, as I've talked in the past, is like a garbage dump. And I know my email has become a garbage dump. I frequently look for your comments, but I can't miss them because some woman wants to meet me to talk about business at lunch this morning. And all sorts of strange things come into my email box. It's a garbage dump within that garbage dump. That's a space in which you can insert many things in many ways. And the idea of credibility is based on what so if you are skillful at using the technology of the Internet, doing it in such a way you can pretend to be whoever you want to be. And these people on both sides are trained to be who they were supposed to be, practiced in it, and so on and so forth. The ability to shape public opinion based on the technologies available today are so much greater than what was possible with radio, shortwave radio and stuff like that. So we're in a different place. The Internet and email, as well as become a garbage dump, is a place where that has to evolve into something that makes social awareness and political awareness possible. Now there are now the technologies that can do that. I think Doug knows something more about this than I do. But for the obvious person, I just don't know if that woman really doesn't want to meet me at 10 o' clock this morning. And I suspect she wouldn't expect. She's not a woman. I don't know what it is, but the ability to manipulate minds through the Internet is an extraordinary weapon.
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B
And I would say too, when you think about this from an adversarial perspective, the United States is bound by the rule of law and we have ethical boundaries and all those sorts of things that our adversaries don't pay any attention to. And so when you've got something that is communicating in the online information environment, whether it's a real person or it's a bot, and you can design these bots and algorithms to be sensitive to culture, sensitive to language, so on and so forth, so that it sounds like the real thing. And I, I was reminded while you were talking, George, this, this idea of the dead Internet that's been kicking around out there, people have written pretty extensively about it, but the idea behind the dead Internet is that at what point does the content on the Internet become so artificially generated, so much of it being artificially generated, that it's not useful as a, as a tool anymore. And to say that it's artificially generated is not the same as saying it's false. But you know, a lot of those things are not precise and they certainly can be false, even though there's things that are generated that are true. And I've read estimates that somewhere between 50 and 55% of the Internet right now is artificially generated content, and that by the end of 2027, 2028, it's going to be up closer to 70% artificially generated. So when you're using tools like AI, you know, to be able to read and write in the online information environment, that AI is reading things that is on the Internet. And so if it's not right, then how can it possibly come up with a precise writing outcome or an output if it's sort of a garbage in, garbage in, garbage out.
- [07:07]
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At this point, there are two dimensions from what I regard intelligence point of view. The ability of an adversary to penetrate our security systems, systems of communication that are meant to be secure within the government and in companies as well. The other is the ability to build tremendous social tensions on issues that were not seeming to divide us, subtly dividing us. What our adversaries are very good at doing is not simply focusing on social media on political issues. They create divisions on social issues. We talked about abortion, homosexuality, whatever, okay? So long as they can fragment the society, so long as they create a tension within the society, all this is possible to do. So we've seen various things coming up that have divided us deeply, and these people know how to manipulate that. So while I'm concerned about penetrating our secrets, well, that's a game that has gone on ever since the Greeks. That game is played, and all sides are playing it. Okay, that's not it. That we're using technology to do that. Well, I will assume that on each side there are sufficient technologists to be able to engage in this combat where it really becomes very dangerous. As we can see, within the social tension of the United States today are the divisions that are built. Many of these we would not have seen 10 years ago. It is not that they created these tensions. They exacerbated them, utilized having found an issue that divides Americans in building structures, maybe AI run, but it's very sophisticated in coming in. And they stage arguments with each other. Many times on the Internet, I've seen arguments that have to be staged because nobody else was talking about it. And it evolves. And the fundamental problem is the degree to which people at this point use the Internet as the primary source of information. So from the standpoint of information warfare, propaganda, whatever you want to call it, okay? This is a tremendous vulnerability to all countries. And it's not only state actors that are engaged in this. I see many indications of corporate involvement in various dimensions, okay? Discrediting others not only outside of the United States, but within the United States. But on the other hand, we don't know who is speaking. We don't know who we're dealing with. And the tendency is to believe what you hear because it's done in such a credible way that this is the way that Americans would speak to each other, write to each other, and so on and so forth. There's no face to it, there's no accent to it. One of the wonderful things that used to be is that learning American in college, you're going to have an accent, boy, and you're not going to be able to avoid that. So you had to recruit Americans, and that was a harder job to do. So at this point, the way that the system operates is anonymity. I mean, I don't think there has ever been in human history a system so committed to anonymity from the day that human beings learned to talk to each other. Okay? And that this would be constitutionally guaranteed as free speech violates the principle of free speech the founders had, which was not that you can say anything you want without consequence, but you won't have a government consequence. However, your wife will leave you, your children will hate you, and your best friend don't want to talk to you anymore. Social pressure is impossible under these circumstances. And I think many players, even small countries, manipulate this to some extent on areas they want. For example, the communities of immigrants who come into the United States become targets of their own country and of other countries to divide in particular ways on particular issues, thereby creating pressures on the government itself based on the fact that they have a and empathy to their homelands. The way this evolved is unsustainable. Now, one of the uses of artificial intelligence should be to detect artificial intelligence, because that has a certain model. And by now we can kind of see the model because it knows so much but so little about many things. When they do it, you can start sensing it, and I suspect is that mathematics and methodology can be used. But I am saying that this is a fundamental social crisis. It was predictable that there would be a social crisis in the 2020s. I predicted the intensity of this social crisis. The divisions that are present are not only a threat to national security, because solidarity of a nation is a fundamental aspect of national security. It also is a danger to lives because it's such a powerful force that we don't really understand the nature of social crime. I'm not talking about bank robbers and stuff like that. I'm talking about violence between people themselves. And certainly it has stressed us on many other issues as well. But you can also target a particular issue, particular community that you want to do something, or it's enormously powerful. Create a website based on geopolitical forecasting, and I'm able to create chaos. Recently I got a call from a Greek author or a creed who wanted to know why we were so favorable to Turkey. We refer Turkey. We just talked about Turkey. We didn't talk about Greece. So these are things that. This is a minor matter, but it's an outward show of what can happen. I don't think the Internet and email as it's currently structured will survive this decade. It cannot. It has to be made profoundly different. Okay. Because at this point I no longer can communicate with my own readers because so much junk comes in. I can't figure out which is coming from Beijing and which is coming from next door and how they want me to answer it. So I have a particular need for this and so does everybody else. So I regard this not so much as a national security threat. Ultimately, the penetration of government, government entities is more dangerous than that level. I regard this as a massive new dimension of geopolitical warfare dividing the populations. And it works.
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