Sydney Dialogue Pointed the Need for Global Tech Governance

The month of November saw the world’s first-ever conference dedicated to emerging and critical technologies. The Sydney Dialogue, a brainchild of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), was held virtually from November 17-19.The presence of and the delivery of keynote addresses from key political leaders emphasized the criticality of the dialogue. In the current digital and information age, emerging technologies have become an intrinsic part of everybody’s lives as well as tools of statecraft. There was a common vision echoed throughout the discussions: The design, deployment, and usage of these technologies need effective regulations to minimize the harms and maximize the benefits that critical and emerging technologies have to offer.

The contest to create the web's third generation has intensified

There are now three broad visions for the future of the internet. The first is a transformation into what Tim Berners-Lee calls “Web 3.0", a network that understands natural language and, depending on who you ask, will be open and ubiquitous, allow users to take back control from corporations and governments, and include billions of Things like sensors, robots and kitchen sinks. This vision is promoted by veterans and purists who believe that Big Tech’s dominance undermines open protocols that enable the internet, and also by many in the tech community who resent the market power of Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon. For their part, the world’s biggest tech companies see that it will be harder to grow at the giddy rates they are used to, and sprawling across various sectors can only take them so far. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg is promoting the second vision, that of a “metaverse", an immersive 3-D virtual reality world where everyone will have to wear goggles to plug in. Beyond Meta (previously Facebook), Microsoft, Roblox and many other companies are throwing their weight behind this vision while trying to get to the head of the queue.

Needed: Intelligent act to regulate AI

The 41st General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) concluded on 24 November 2021 with a major step on the global development of norms on the use and regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI).193 member states of UNESCO signed and adopted the draft AI Ethics Recommendation. It can be touted as the first globally accepted normative standard-setting instrument in the realm of AI. The voluntary, non-binding commitment is a major point of cooperation between States and leaders in identifying principles of ethics in the regulation AI systems that find wide application in today’s world.

India Needs a 20-Year Semiconductor Strategy

To succeed in semiconductor manfacturing, it is essential to reflect on the difference between being able to manufacture one line of chips and achieving semiconductor self-sufficiency or even becoming a key manufacturer. The current discourse masks this difference. The dominant narrative suggests that India is in a do or die situation, one in which building a fab now implies the elimination of critical strategic vulnerabilities. In contrast, another failure means India is resigned to a position of weakness in the information age. This understanding is misplaced. Getting one fab going will not make India a key manufacturer. We will still be dependent on manufacturing equipment, designs, and chips manufactured outside India. India needs to drop the dream of swadeshi semiconductors. Instead, it should aim to become a key player in a trusted, plurilateral semiconductor ecosystem that keeps key adversaries out. In our view, at least five specific parts of the puzzle need to fall in place.

If not for the internet...

One of the most interesting things about living in a small town is discovering bits of history where you thought none existed. The pandemic has forced me to move back to my hometown, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. As a city, Kanpur has a rich colonial history and was an eventful place during 1857.Last week, I listened to the Kanpur and Lucknow episode of the Musafir Stories (an excellent podcast). I learned about 'Baron Carlo Marochetti Road', or as it is known today in the city, 'Doodhwali Gali'. The Baron Marochetti Road is named after an Italian-French sculptor who was responsible for sculpting the Cawnpore Memorial. This monument represents the loss of 73 women and 124 children in July 1857.Read the full article in Deccan Herald

The Race for the Domination of AI Chips

With AI and advanced semiconductor technology an integral part of Industry 4.0, the impact of AI chips on the global technology landscape will gradually evolve in the coming decade.  The concept of new applications of semiconductors is gradually emerging and the concept of using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms on high-end chipsets has opened an entirely new market for these devices, also known as AI chips. 

Why China’s Quest to Dominate Global Tech Standards Looks Far-fetched

The rise of China’s technological growth has created ripples in the world technology ecosystem.

The global tech markets, which were generally dominated by the West have come under immense geopolitical and geoeconomic pressure due to China’s rapid growth in developing emerging technologies. The Chinese government has created a vision for the State to dominate the global tech supply chains and eventually concentrate geopolitical power. At the heart of this vision lies technical standards and the role they play in determining the balance of power between technologically adept states.

A ‘bubbles of trust’ approach

An asymmetric globalisation favouring China allowed Beijing to attain power. It is now using that power to undermine liberal democratic values around the world. The Chinese market was never open to foreign companies in the way foreign markets are to Chinese firms. This is particularly true in the information and communications technology sector: foreign media, technology and software companies have always been walled out of Chinese markets. Meanwhile, Chinese firms rode on the globalisation bandwagon to secure significant market shares in open economies. President Xi Jinping now formally requires Chinese firms to follow the political agenda of the Chinese Communist Party. But even before this, it was not possible to tell where private ownership ended and the party-state began.We are currently witnessing a global retreat from the free movement of goods, services, capital, people and ideas. But this should not be understood as a reaction to globalisation itself, but of its skewed pattern over the past four decades.Read the full article here.

US-China Missile Rivalry opens up New Opportunities for India

China has been showing off its hypersonic missiles for the past several years. That Chinese scientists have been publishing papers reporting their advances in such a sensitive field indicates that Beijing wants the world to know that it is developing these weapons. The US government is quite obviously aware of this. So one would not expect Washington to be greatly surprised to find that China has tested hypersonic missiles a couple of times this year.Yet, reports in the Financial Times and elsewhere have had US officials expressing shock at this development and comparing China’s hypersonic missile tests to a “Sputnik moment", a Cold War reference recalling how the Soviet Union surprised the world in 1957 by being the first to put an artificial satellite in orbit. We do not have the full details and Beijing’s missile is bound to be innovative in some ways, but the official reaction in Washington seems to be exaggerated.Read the full article on The Mint

The Geopolitics of the Arctic: What it Means for the EU, Russia and India

Cooperation on researching the melting permafrost in the Arctic region can bring together the EU, Russia and India

Read the full article on Hindustan Times

Why India, Taiwan should strengthen ties

As the world gets back on its feet from the Covid-19 pandemic while reeling under a global chip shortage, Taiwan has become an important geopolitical focal point. Taiwan’s stranglehold over the semiconductor industry and its overall technology expertise have demonstrated its strategic importance in the global world order.Taipei’s New Southbound Policy was envisaged by President Tsai Ing-wen to enhance cooperation between Taiwan and other major states in Southeast and South Asia. India, on the other hand, formulated the Act East Policy as a major diplomatic initiative to promote economic strategic relations with other states in the Indo-Pacific region.With both India and Taiwan looking to deepen diplomatic ties in their respective regions, now would be the opportune time for the two states to forge an alliance built on common interests.

(Re)Defining Social Media as Digital Communication Networks

This article originally appeared in TheQuint with the headline 'We Need a Better Definition for Social Media To Solve Its Problems.' An excerpt is reproduced here.

The Need For a New Term

Conversations around ‘social media platforms’ also tend to fixate on specific companies, the prevalence of certain types of information on their platforms (misleading information, hate speech, etc.) and their actions in response (content enforcement of community standards, applications of labels, compliance with government orders, etc.). While this is certainly relevant, it is out of step with the nascent yet growing understanding of the reality that most users, and especially motivated actors (whether good or bad), operate across a range of social media platforms. In the current information ecosystem, any effects — adverse or positive — are rarely limited to one particular network but ripple outwards across different networks, as well as off them.

There’s nothing wrong with an evolving term, but it must be consistent and account for future-use cases. Does ‘social media platforms’ translate well to the currently buzz-wordy ‘metaverse’ use-case, which, with communication at its core, shares some of the fundamental characteristics identified earlier? Paradoxically, the term ‘social media platform’ is simultaneously evolving and stagnant, expansive yet limiting.This is one of the reasons my colleagues at The Takshashila Institution and I proposed the frame of 'Digital Communication Networks' (DCNs), which have three components — capability, operators and networks.Read More

India needs a framework to regulate the use of artificial intelligence

The White House Offiice of Science and Technology Policy called for a new Charter of rights for the 21st century last week, aptly titled the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bill of Rights. These rights are envisioned as the first step to ensure the protection of established norms of civil rights, and aim to direct the development and use of technology in ways that are compatible with constitutional mandates, furthering the interpretation of the Bill of Rights in today’s world of data and algorithms.Such initiatives are gaining momentum across the world. The European Union (EU) proposed the Artificial Intelligence Act this summer, initiating conversations on regulating the development and use of AI. The objective was to create conditions for the effective functioning of the EU’s single market, adhering to standards of safety and governance while creating legal certainty.Read the full article on Hindustan Times

Prospects of Indian and Chinese collaboration with Russia on a Joint Space Station

Read the full Article on Valdai ClubIndia’s strategic rival China has already made advances in maintaining a sustained human presence in orbit and the learning curve for India appears steep. Only collaboration with Russia can give India a leg up and may perhaps be the only path for India to catch up to China in any meaningful way, writes Aditya Pareek, Research Analyst at the Bangalore-based Takshashila Institution. Read the full Article on Valdai Club

Japan aims to toughen up its cybersecurity

Read the full article on Asia Times

Tokyo's draft cybersecurity strategy points to China, Russia and North Korea as threats

These consolidated moves on cybersecurity and high-tech cooperation by Japan, unilaterally, bilaterally and in multilateral fora like the Quad are nothing short of impressive.In recent years Japan has also been more open to involving its Self-Defense Forces (SDF) in domains like cybersecurity that represent a gray area between civilian and military space.Read the full article on Asia Times

World is Entering A New Moon Age

Read the full article on Times of India It will require India to do some tough space diplomacy between divergent spacefaring campsOn September 7, 2019, India’s Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander crashed in a cloud of lunar dust no human would witness. It had experienced a “hard landing” on a desolate patch of the lunar surface. Isro chairman K Sivan called the mission “98% successful”, which implicitly acknowledged the sheer difficulty of such undertakings but also reflected the combination of optimism and determination that go into India’s spacefaring aspirations. Read the full article on Times of India

Will the Quad Tangle with the O-RAN Alliance?

While China and Huawei may have won the 5G race, all is definitely not lost for those looking to reduce their dependencies on the Chinese telecom infrastructure.Technology was a major area of focus during the first in-person summit held in the United States. The Quad has already created a working group on critical and emerging technologies to facilitate cooperation and innovation between the states. Semiconductors and 5G were the areas of focus in the technology sphere with an idea of using alternative 5G technology to create a global communications standard.A 5G deployment and diversification effort is already in the works with the “support and the critical role of Quad governments in fostering and promoting a diverse, resilient and secure telecommunications ecosystem,” as mentioned by White House officials.

This is where open radio access networks (O-RAN) and the O-RAN alliance come into the picture.

The regulation of social media can be an opportunity for India

This article was originally published in The MintChina gives us an estimate of how many people you need to effectively monitor content on the internet. The Great Firewall employs over 100,000 people to prevent around a billion Chinese internet users from accessing content Beijing considers undesirable. That is one censor for every 10,000 users. In contrast, according to Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who released internal company documents to the media recently, Facebook has around 40,000 employees keeping an eye on content posted by its 2.5 billion users around the world, or a ratio of roughly 1:70,000. Thus, the company would need to employ seven times as many people to match the Beijing standard. In fact, if we account for the fact that Facebook would need to monitor conversations in over 100 languages, it might need as many as half a million censors.Sure, artificial intelligence can perhaps reduce the headcount requirements, especially if clever humans don’t stay a step ahead of censorship rules as they generally have throughout history. Even so, if social media networks come to be mandated to monitor user content as part of the ongoing scrutiny by the world’s governments, the world will need millions of censors in the coming years. They will be called content oversight officers, online safety managers, country compliance executives, forum moderators and suchlike, but the job scope will essentially be to prevent certain types of content from spreading on their networks.There is one problem, though: Good censors are hard to find. In a speech to parliament in 1644 opposing the censorship of books, poet John Milton said: “He who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books... had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious. If he be of such worth as behooves him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets... we may easily foresee what kind of licensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary." In other words, good censorship demands wise and learned people, but ends up attracting only the wrong sort. This problem will not trouble authoritarian governments very much, but social media networks concerned about free speech are bound to hit a human-resource crunch pretty soon.The demand for “a person above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious" is not restricted to just content moderators for social media companies. Given how deeply and profoundly the tech industry already impacts society, everyone from engineers and developers to chief executives and investors will need to have a better understanding of a range of disciplines in the social sciences. Facebook’s current troubles demonstrate how difficult it is to retrofit social responsibility and ethical considerations on business models and corporate cultures that were designed for different goals. If you are building a startup today, you are better-off paying less attention to cynical industry veterans who’ll tell you to ignore the idealistic stuff and chase the money. The next few years will likely see legislation in several major countries designed to hold big tech companies accountable for social ills caused by the use of their products.Negative and harmful content is usually more contagious, and this phenomenon is amorally exploited by growth-seeking business models to the detriment of society. Haugen’s testimony to the US Congress last week contained nothing we didn’t already know, but it is nevertheless an important milestone in the growing political realization that the negative social consequences of social media have become too serious to ignore. If lawmakers in the United States knew what to do about it, they would perhaps have done it. Unfortunately, they do not, yet. In the meantime, expect piecemeal legislation over specific issues flagged by whistleblowers and activists, tempered by the tech industry and its lobbyists.The emerging new balance between public interest, tech-industry business models and online behaviour is an opportunity for India’s tech industry and its people. In addition to technical skills, an aspiring tech entrepreneur or employee will need to be broadly educated and capable of making value judgements. Let’s be honest: Too little in our education system prepares us for this. Our smartest people can solve calculus problems, but are unlikely to know much about the ideas of Bentham or the Bhagavad Gita. Encouraging new liberal arts universities and including social-science subjects in engineering and science curriculums at the undergraduate level is part of the answer.I am also optimistic that market forces will drive companies and individuals to invest in training in ethics, responsible strategy and social impact analysis. (Full disclosure: I teach courses on these subjects at the Takshashila Institution). India’s competitive advantage in the tech economy has always been high- quality human capital at scale. The challenge now is to create millions of people who can exercise good judgement in addition to writing great code. 

The Quad Makes the First Siliconpolitik Move

Summary

An earlier paper on ‘Siliconpolitik: The Case for a Quad Semiconductor Partnership’ made a detailed case for a Quad partnership on semiconductors. It argued that the Quad’s technology cooperation agenda should focus on semiconductors due to their ‘metacriticality’. Further, it reasoned that “since each Quad member enjoys a comparative advantage in a specific sub-domain of the semiconductor supply chain, this grouping is well-placed to collaborate.” With these arguments as a reference point, this paper analyses the semiconductor supply chain collaboration announcement at the first in-person Quad Leaders’ Summit.Read the full paper on the Institute of South Asian Studies website here [HTML & PDF]. 

Fantasy sport, Karnataka’s online gambling ban, and what policymaking gets wrong

Over the past few years, online fantasy sport (OFS) in India have gone from being a rather shady area of niche interest to becoming ubiquitous, so much so that a fantasy sport platform, Dream 11, was the title sponsor of IPL 2020. Indeed, the IPL viewing experience has changed significantly in recent years, with the long breaks between overs now stuffed with an array of commercials about cryptocurrencies, mutual funds and above all, fantasy sport. To someone unfamiliar with state-level policy developments in the country, this omnipresence of fantasy sport commercials would seem to suggest the presence of a thriving and safe fantasy sport industry, but the reality, of course, is quite the opposite.Creating fantasy teams and participating in fantasy sport contests, as would be obvious to many, involves a significant amount of domain knowledge, for instance, of cricket gameplay, player form, pitch conditions, and a deep understanding of the intricacies of T20 cricket (like wickets in powerplay overs are more valuable than in the death overs). Thus, investing money in an OFS cannot be called gambling.

Read the full article in Hindutan Times.