In a recent podcast, Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University, laid out a plausible and terrifying way to weaponize artificial intelligence. Obviously, misinformation, he said, is a threat. But the real power of AI will be “tapping into men’s loneliness.” One out of seven men don’t have a single close friend. Sixty percent of men are single. Twenty percent cannot find a sexual partner. Men are lonely, depressed, see no way out of this, and account for 80% of suicides.
Forget AI super-weapons, Galloway said. “If I were an adversary or a bad actor, I would identify the two or three million very lonely men who serve in the armed services or at our ports or our critical infrastructure, and I would develop a very sophisticated network of AI girlfriends.” The bots would start relationships with service members for several months, complete with erotic photographs.
Unlike traditional honeytrap-style intelligence operations, AI can scale massively. A 0.01% success rate would yield 3,000 young men in sensitive positions. After AI wins their affections across months, “you flip it and say ‘You know what real leadership and real men do? They fight against tyranny… When this box comes into the port, I don’t want you to check it.’ Or ‘You’re on the aircraft carrier strike force off the coast of the Mediterranean—turn off this switch.’”
He explains that young men who are susceptible to romantic AI algorithms are susceptible to radicalization, and can be instructed on behaviors. Artificial intelligence cannot push buttons. Some systems are well hardened against cyberattacks. But if you can get soldiers to do the work for you, the game is over before it begins.
COLD WAR 2.0
I thought about this while reading Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America, by George S. Takach, a thoughtful, harrowing exploration of the many electronic battlefields now being prepped by an “Arc of Autocracy” that includes China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Takach asserts that Western democracies are in a cold war with these autocracies, which “are determined to overturn the rules-based international order.” The current attack by autocracies is “sustained, systemic, and global in nature.”
Cold War 2.0 explores the origins of modern authoritarianism in states antagonistic to the United States. Takach charts its ascent in post-Soviet Russia, from the rickety democracy under Boris Yeltsin to the canny moves by Vladimir Putin to consolidate his power. It explains how an onslaught of new technologies—everything from artificial intelligence to quantum computing—have enabled unprecedented campaigns of espionage and manipulation, and give extant weapons and surveillance systems astonishing new capabilities.
This new cold war—unlike “Cold War 1”—will not be a zero-sum game. Victory is not regime change, but rather, stable, continued trade, with a severing of joint technologies and innovations.
LESSONS LEARNED IN UKRAINE
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was a good example of what the West should not do, going forward. Our failure to demonstrate collective resolve to “fend off both cold war and hot war enemies,” led Putin to conclude, quite accurately, that he could mount a full-scale invasion in 2022. This has implications for China, which similarly wants to invade Taiwan. Democracies must make sure China knows that the cost of such an invasion would be destabilizing, and ultimately, a failure. “A key goal of the democracies must be to ensure that there will only be one major war for territorial expansion in the 21st century, and not two.”
In Takach’s estimation, “The best way for the democracies to convey this urgent message to autocratic leaders is to declare that the autocracies and the democracies are already in a cold war. Then, by taking measures appropriate for such a cold war, the democracies can demonstrate their collective resolve to fend off both cold war and hot war enemies.”
WHERE THE COLD WAR IS FOUGHT
The critical “fault lines” of the new cold war include artificial intelligence, which “not only progresses at warp speed itself, but it serves as an accelerant turbocharging all other technology innovation as well.” Semiconductors, which are “the lifeblood of the modern economy and military,” will also take a leading role. Quantum computing, meanwhile, is vital for computationally-heavy modeling and encryption. Lastly, biotechnologies are vital for combating disease and boosting declining populations.
The United States leads on virtually every technological aspect of this cold war. However, as Takach explains, the nation defends itself poorly against intellectual property theft. This weakness goes back at least to the atomic bomb, which the Soviet Union stole with impunity. “The practice continued for several other weapons systems, and then relative to civilian projects such as large commercial aircraft, jet engines, and computer software (lots and lots of computer software),” Takach writes.
Today, China is perhaps the most notorious such offender. In the 1990s, the Chinese government sought admission to the World Trade Organization. A condition for acceptance was that it curtail intellectual property theft. China accepted the terms, gained admission, and changed not a single behavior. “Moreover, when the Internet was adopted by business the world over, Chinese and Russian hackers (condoned, encouraged, and sheltered by the Chinese and Russian governments), became expert in stealing intellectual property from the democracies by using online methods.”
Larceny evolved eventually into sophisticated hacking campaigns. Notable was the Russian ransomware attack against the Colonial Pipeline in 2021. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, there was “sweeping and systematic” interference by way of social media influence and disinformation.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE METAVERSE
As described in Cold War 2.0, “One of the great strengths of democracies is their openness. That very openness, alas, is also one of their principal weaknesses. The openness allows the autocracies to pump social media into the democracies that is full of disinformation.”
Social media has suffused our lives and in many ways supplanted traditional media. The proliferation of disinformation on such platforms is helped along by paywalls, which separate citizens from high-quality journalism. Social media companies must ban accounts from “obvious nefarious foreign agents,” writes Takach. In addition, “the more money the social media platform makes from the disinformation the more it should pay to fund independent journalism in that region.”
It will also require a populace willing to educate itself, and governments willing to offer the necessary training. “In Cold War 2.0 all the citizens of the democracies are frontline troops in the struggle against disinformation and weapons of hacking destruction, and citizens of all ages need to be given the proper weapons and training so they become resilient against them.”
The social media problem is only going to get worse. Though Takach does not address it in his book, the principles he lays out apply quite well to the coming “metaverse” of virtual and augmented reality. In the long term, it will increase both disinformation and radicalization using the same mechanisms as social media. The metaverse is profoundly intimate, built on real-time social interaction and movement in personal spaces. It is a direct appeal not to what we like to read, but what we like to experience. As such, it might become a more powerful force than social media, if used malevolently. A recent study published in Perspectives on Terrorism called it a “toolbox for terrorism.” Its chief selling points—“presence” and “embodiment”—make it such a harrowing place from a national security point of view. This is especially so with coupled with artificial intelligence.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Indeed, AI is the foundation of all troubles (and opportunities) ahead. As Takach writes, “Artificial intelligence will be central to all the protagonists involved in Cold War 2.0, for the simple reason that it will become a core technology—perhaps the core technology—of the 21st century.” In the civilian side, it speeds up drug research and helps with marketing analyses. The military, meanwhile, uses it for everything from missile guidance systems to surveillance platforms. Authoritarian states have been highly effective in using it to oppress citizenry.
Which is one reason that Takach is optimistic about how our the second Cold War will play out. “The democracies will prevail,” he writes, “for many of the reasons they won Cold War 1.” Chief among them, “the singular ability of the democracies to innovate technology to produce far superior economic, military, and soft power than that generated by the autocracies.”
I hope he is right, and his excellent book certainly leaves me hopeful. I agree that the U.S. will ultimately bury Russia and China with respect to semiconductors. Likewise AI sophistication, and other key technologies. But then I think about how psychologically vulnerable western society has become. As Scott Galloway pointed out, using technologies of Cold War 2.0, it would be trivial to leverage this weakness. To wage a war, cold or hot, you have to want to wage it. I see little evidence that the young men and women who will actually have to win this battle have any interest in doing so.
