Hybrid Emerging Threats and Information Warfare: The Story of the Cyber-AI Deception Machine (original) (raw)

2020, 21st Century Prometheus

Across the world, at any given moment, there are pervasive cognitive-emotional conflicts being waged for the control of populations' thoughts, emotions, and attitudes. These battles of influence do not tend to occur in wartime, but rather in peacetime, infiltrating homes and smart cities. They sow disinformation, affective manipulation, and forgeries as new means of undermining social cohesion and trust. They exacerbate societal tensions and amplify public polarization. They increasingly condition and limit notions of self-determination and could continue to do so with the future generations to come. The rise of cognitive-emotional conflicts and the subsequent "trust-deficit disorder" they unleash is born out of the entanglement of technology, data, and geopolitics. The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) with other emerging technologies creates the potential for deception and subversive attacks that manipulate populations' perceptions. In the near future, what will matter is not who "wins" new territories, but who controls the data and wins the trust, the hearts, and the minds of citizens within any given country or polity. Cyberspace has become not only a new domain of fierce competition over information, business, and strategic technological operations, but also a new battlefield, in ways that blur the line between war and peace and make each of us a potential