Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Books, Defence, Military, Science, Technology

Robocops to become part of UK’s defence vision

FUTURISTIC VISION FOR DEFENCE

Intro: Weapons technology scientists recruit sci-fi authors to prepare military for droid soldiers and AI

In the 1987 sci-fi blockbuster RoboCop, actor Peter Weller growled: “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me”. The idea of cyborg law enforcers roaming the streets was a fantasy.

Now, British military scientists believe AI-powered cops like those seen in the film could become a reality – and have teamed up with science fiction writers to create a vision of what that could look like.

The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) has unveiled Creative Futures, a book of short stories designed to inspire the developers of future weapons tech.

The collection, edited by Dr Allen Stroud of Coventry University, brings together authors and defence experts to imagine scenarios stretching as far forward as 2122.

Professor Tim Dafforn, the chief scientific adviser at the Ministry of Defence, said: “Innovation isn’t just about inventing new technology – it’s about understanding how it will be used, and by whom.

Fiction gives us the freedom to explore those scenarios in ways traditional analysis cannot, helping defence prepare for futures that are complex, contested, and unpredictable. If we only plan for what seems likely today, we will be blindsided tomorrow.”

The stories in Creative Futures explore how emerging tech, a changing society, and global challenges could shape the world of defence and security over the next 100 years.

They cover everything from robot policing and the rise of AI to quantum technology that can predict the future, and wars fought between autonomous machines – already seen with the use of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war.

The DSTL says one of its aims is to help Britain’s defence and security services avoid being taken by surprise by the use of tech in a conflict.

It believes that, by combining scientific expertise with storytelling, the short stories offer a “unique lens to consider alternative futures – both desirable and undesirable”.

The DSTL futures programme management team says the anthology is aimed to “engage, evoke, and provoke”, and in pushing defence scientists to “imagine new ways of working” and “rethink what the future could be”.

It says that preparing for the future means thinking beyond the next upgrade or system. Science fiction challenges us to consider the human, societal, and geopolitical dimensions of technology.

Dr Stroud said: “Science fiction isn’t just entertainment – it’s a strategic tool. These stories help us explore the risks and opportunities of emerging technologies beyond today’s horizon that we might otherwise miss.”

– Creative Futures is available to buy online

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Computing, Digital Economy, Technology

Quantum computing threatens crypto’s future

CRYPTOCURRENCIES

Intro: Bitcoin et al are increasingly becoming more insecure – and not just because of price volatility

In Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep, the novelist imagines a world hundreds of years in the future where humanity has regressed to a medieval standard of living, population, and way of thinking.

Towards the end of the book, we learn what might have caused this calamity: not a pandemic, meteorite strike, or nuclear war, but a complete collapse in the digital economy.

From payment systems to Just-In-Time supply chains and the wealth of machinery that sustains us, the modern economy is almost wholly dependent on digital instruction.

If everything went down all at the same time, a state of anarchy would rapidly establish itself. In the ensuing chaos, it would be every man for himself with likely devastating consequences for lives and civilisation more widely.

It is hard to imagine what combination of circumstances might completely and lastingly disable the digital economy. However, cyber threats are very much a real, present, and fast increasing danger.

You only need to look at what happened to Jaguar Land Rover last year to see the dire consequences when firewalls are breached. It closed the UK automotive company down for more than a month.

Growing resources and time are being devoted to further securing these systems in more or less every walk of life – a prime example of the diseconomies of technology if ever there was one – and not least in the wild-west world of cryptocurrencies, wholly dependent as they are on complex encryption to safeguard value and assign ownership rights. The threat posed to these assets by advances and developments in quantum computing has long been a main topic of debate in the Bitcoin community. The issue has recently gone viral after being raised in Christopher Wood’s much-followed Greed and Fear investment newsletter.

As the head of equity strategy at the investment bank Jefferies, Wood points out that deriving a public key from a private key is computationally simple. Bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency rely for their security on the assumption that the reverse operation would take trillions of years, even for a sophisticated supercomputer. But as Wood says, “This asymmetry collapses with the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers, potentially reducing the time to derive a private key from a public key to mere hours or days.”

The launch by Microsoft of the Majorana One quantum chip may have accelerated so-called “Q-Day” – the date when quantum computers become powerful enough to break most current public-key encryption – by several years. A report published early last summer by Chaincode Labs estimated that up to 50pc of all Bitcoins in circulation (four to 10 million of them) could be vulnerable to theft, with reused addresses and “Satoshi-era” wallets thought to be the most exposed. These were named after Bitcoin’s anonymous founder.

They call Bitcoin “digital gold”. A better description might be fool’s gold, for the whole construct depends crucially on a constantly expanding pool of demand.

Once that demand stabilises or falls then the whole store-of-value illusion begins to collapse. Whether the threat from quantum computing is real or not, it’s giving plenty of pause for thought. It also appears to be quite seriously damaging attempts by Donald Trump’s White House to normalise crypto as a respectable asset class.

BlackRock flagged quantum computing as a key risk when launching its iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF last year while El Salvador, the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, has seen fit to split its reserves of the virtual currency between 14 different addresses as insurance against potential theft.

Wood himself was an early convert to crypto, but he appears to have lost the faith, reallocating the entire 10pc of his synthetic portfolio once occupied by Bitcoin to physical gold and gold-mining stocks.

Not that you need to crack the encryption code to steal Bitcoin. Contrary to the sales pitch, cryptocurrencies are already one of the most insecure forms of money around – and not just because their price is so volatile.

North Korean hackers managed to swipe $1.5bn (£1.1bn) from the crypto exchange Bybit in February last year. For the year as a whole, a total of $3.5bn of Bitcoin is reckoned to have been stolen. Particularly vulnerable are those who brag acclaim about their crypto wealth on social media: extortion or kidnap can quickly follow.

And because the whole purpose of crypto is to be free of government oversight and interference, it makes the funds virtually impossible to recover once a wallet has been opened and drained by someone else.

In any case, some quite extreme solutions to the quantum threat have been proposed, including simply burning the vulnerable coins in an attempt to preserve the currency’s underlying integrity.

Extreme, yes, and also a root-and-branch betrayal of individual property rights – a bit like telling half of all sterling account holders that their money had been cancelled. In such circumstances, the pound would never be trusted again.

It is not just crypto that is at risk from quantum computing. The entire payments system, which is similarly just numbers on a computer screen, would also be exposed.

Harris’s imagined societal collapse in his novel may not be as fanciful as it seems.

From its early origins in Caesar’s cipher, encryption has been a constantly evolving and improving form of security. Maybe money, both crypto and fiat, can indeed be made quantum resilient.

But there is no compelling answer to the quantum threat yet and the two underlying forces that have sustained Bitcoin and its mini-mes from the start – worries about debasement of fiat currencies and the appeal of self-custody – will lose their value if it turns out your wallet can be easily stolen. There has never been an exact correlation between the price of Bitcoin and that of gold but up until the past several days, the two seemed to have completely decoupled, with the gold price surging ahead over the past year but Bitcoin flat or falling.

Digital gold it is not, and that’s possibly got something to do with the threat posed by quantum computing.

Despite enthusiastic backing from the Trump White House, crypto has so far failed to achieve the credibility among institutional investors that promoters were hoping.

For all its faults, fiat currency – backed by the taxpayer and underwritten by the central bank – continues to be a more secure form of money than the snake oil of a decentralised ledger.

Like almost everything else, crypto has become part of the culture wars divide, such that true believers are far more likely to be on the American Right than the Left.

Yet, any hopes Trump might have had of enriching himself, his backers, and his supporters by fully embracing the crypto revolution have so far proved misplaced.

Recent falls have wiped out the entirety of the gains seen under Trump’s swashbuckling, deregulatory agenda. It’s not the end of the world – but nor is it the reinvention of money once promised or hoped for.

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Government, Israel, Legal, Myanmar, Politics, Society, United Nations

Genocide once had meaning. It has become a political tool

GENOCIDE

Of the many examples of moral collapse in society today, the debasement of genocide has been among the ugliest. Using the megaphone of social media, activists, hostile states, the media, and non-governmental organisations have corrupted a precise legal term to smear troops who were issuing evacuation orders, facilitating aid handouts, and fighting an enemy that used human shields. If the proper meaning of genocide is lost, no Western army will be safe.

As Keir Starmer’s failed attempts to marshal international law against our own troops who fought in Iraq demonstrated, such instincts are strong amongst progressives. As in London and Strasbourg, so in The Hague. Just days ago, judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, finished hearing a genocide case against Myanmar. Given the appalling atrocities against the Rohingya, few would dispute the verdict if the crime is confirmed. Scratch the surface, however, and trouble is brewing.

Genocide as a modern legal concept first emerged in print in Axis Rule In Occupied Europe, a 1944 book by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. Crucially, it described mass violence with the intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. Lemkin was influenced by the 1915 Armenian massacres, but it was the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews – in which 49 members of his own family were murdered – that provided the catalyst for its inclusion on the statute books.

Since 1945, only five legally confirmed genocides have been recognised by the British government: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and the liquidation of the Yazidis by Islamic State. Between the Srebrenica massacre – the last time the ICJ delivered a guilty verdict – and Myanmar, times have changed.

As part of the Myanmar hearing a few days ago, hostile Facebook posts were presented as evidence. Social media has become part of life since 2007, but there are fears that relying on such contextual and emotive ephemera may eclipse the hard facts. This will especially apply to the ICJ’s next case against Israel.

Aggressive posts and videos of soldiers chanting bloodthirsty slogans already form the backbone of the prosecution’s case against the Jewish state. Whatever our view may be over Palestinian Gaza, are these really evidence of genocidal intent in an army that is said to warn civilians to flee before it attacks? The Myanmar precedent may lead judges to give such things undue weight.

Similarly, NGOs giving evidence against Myanmar included Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both of which have a well-established bias against Israel. None of this necessarily invalidates the case. But it reveals the weakness of the court.

One of the presiding judges, an 84-year-old South African jurist, has already been accused of turning genocide into a political tool. For many years the jurist headed a UN Human Rights Council “commission of inquiry” that was dismissed as laughably biased. As long ago as 2014, 100 members of Congress said the commission that this jurist led could “not be taken seriously as a human rights organisation”. Another commission member later claimed that social media was “controlled by the Jewish lobby”. Sanctions were then called for against “apartheid Israel”.

Last September, the commission produced a highly contemptible and skewed report which pre-emptively found Israel guilty of “genocide” and airbrushed out of its report all other parties to the conflict. Remove the combatants from any war and you have a crime against humanity. Is the jurist leading the commission, then, a proper person to preside over genocide cases at the UN’s highest court?

Like the rest of the world, the UN seems to be deploying “genocide” as a campaigning tool, fuelled by ideology and the often-empty rage of social media.

The California state senator Scott Wiener, who is in line for Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco congressional seat, said the quiet part out loud.

“In terms of the word ‘genocide’, it’s traditionally been a very technical legal term under the Geneva Convention. It is a descriptor for an extreme level of devastation of a people. It’s a heartfelt descriptor.”

Heartfelt or not, replacing facts with emotive feelings is a dangerous game. Just 10 days after October 7, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention accused Israel of “genocide”. Others may conclude that it was an unprecedented military operation. Members of Lemkin’s family are fighting to have his name removed from the institute’s title.

Last Tuesday, Holocaust Memorial Day was held. As any schoolboy knows, or used to know, victims of that genocide totalled about 11 million, of which six million were Jews. Regardless, the BBC and other broadcasters repeatedly paid tribute to the six million “people” who were murdered, erasing the Jews once again as a reprehensible coda to the genocide.

Was that “heartfelt”? It probably was. Unsurprisingly, of the 2,000 secondary schools that marked the Holocaust in 2023, 1,146 have since given it up. Lurking in the background is the cunning little piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, shamefully endorsed by the UN, that when it comes to genocide, the Jews are as bad as the Nazis. Yet nobody has used the G-word for massacres by the Iranian regime, an enemy of our democracies.

How easy it has become to dismiss truth as a quaint and old-fashioned habit. But unmoor legal definitions at your peril. When genocide becomes a political weapon, it is wielded against the West. Be careful what you are aiming for.

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