The collapse of the post-Cold War world order is not simply a military or geopolitical event. It also signals the breakdown of a social contract that humanity had started rebuilding post-WWII. It got depreciated with the Vietnam War, the Arab-Israel Wars of 67 and 73, Indo-Pak Wars of 65 and 71, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the First Gulf War. Notwithstanding, the world started losing its appetite for war. This contract started getting redrafted after 1992, although it had inbuilt weaknesses and loopholes for exploitation, but it did provide for some renewed basis for peaceful co-existence, until the war on terror gained currency the world over. Peace seeking became an apparent overture, which was supported through reduced defence spending by the West, as a percentage of their national GDPs. For thousands of years, across empires, republics, and civilisations, roughly half of all public spending went to war, armies, and fortifications. By the end of the twentieth century, that figure had dropped to six or seven per cent of GDP on average, while budgets for healthcare and education had crossed the magic figure of ten per cent. Countries, with even small economies, had stopped fearing conquests from outsiders and found a window of opportunity to spend more on human capital. That shift was thus an outcome of a shared order which made territorial aggression by anyone, on anyone, functionally unthinkable, outdated and liable to economic punishment. That taboo was, however, broken in its infancy post 9/11, with the USA waging war on terror under the banner reading “Either you are with us or with them.” Subsequently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s stated intent to annex parts of Gaza or the West Bank, and an American President openly threatening the annexation of Greenland, all took their toll in a way that otherwise would have been treated as absurd fiction in the late nineties.
The world, therefore, seems to be entering a new hegemonic era, with no edict to replace the void created by destroying an order and ensuing chaos as a net outcome.
The world, therefore, seems to be entering a new hegemonic era, with no edict to replace the void created by destroying an order and ensuing chaos as a net outcome. Everybody suffers from such a disorder. The world order of the last decade of the 20th century was far from perfect, to which anybody can relate; there was violence, and there was injustice, but then it was better than any of the orders in recent history, which humanity managed to create. What integrates this disintegration and makes it even more dangerous than previous breakdowns in history is the rot that it inflicts on the very instrument that allowed humans to build order in the first place: words, aka language. It is the very instrument through which the human race has threatened, asserted, sympathised, negotiated, ceased fire and passed resolutions to usher in peace and restore order. Humans did not move the world because of physical strength; they conquered it because they discovered how to interact in a language which made strangers cooperate, binding millions into shared belief systems, ideologies, and collective actions. Even in the case of conquering another country, they used rhetoric to subjugate the populace. Language, therefore, remained as one fixed for all and hence was the exclusive human superpower. No other species could wield it. Now something can.
AI has entered the domain of language, and this is no abstraction. Take a look around yourself, what social media alone already did to the fabric of public life over the past decade, and ask what the world looks like ten years from now when AI is expected to completely take over human communication. The social consequences are already visible in every strand of our lives. The information overload is perpetual and mind-boggling, to the extent of being shocking. For the people, there is no genuine recovery. The organic human being, built to rest, to disconnect, to forget and to be forgotten, is being given a run as a machine. Extend this further into personal lives. Every action, every statement, every moment is now potentially on record. Even the Bernie Sanders Report to the US Congress on AI talks of AI investment tycoons who conceptualise perpetually monitored citizens, who have no option but to always be or act to be, at the best of their behaviours. In other words, life is transforming into one long job interview, in which every moment is being observed for a later evaluation. Therefore, it is a structural change in how power is being and will be more and more exercised over individuals.
AI is not a tool that leverages only language, but a force that could strip humans of the one faculty that invoked large-scale cooperation. As the environment floods every other media with junk information, intelligence itself becomes a liability rather than an asset. Highly intelligent people, when fed false information, make bad decisions without much ado and hence tend to be more delusional than those with average intelligence. Precisely, intelligence without accurate information just follows a garbage-in-garbage-out algorithm, producing elaborate, well-reasoned decision-making errors, even at the strategic level.
With information flooding, those who flood think that, by doing so, the corresponding proportion of perceived truth in the mix will increase too. On the contrary, truth settles down as a sediment rock, not available for consumption at the top and only fiction, myths and concoctions remain afloat on the surface. Misleading and disinforming to the hilt. We can well imagine what happens to the decision-making capability of humans, especially those who are expected to lead wars and settle scores under information garbage, and of societies forming opinions on the legality of outcomes.
The common denominator to all three, war, AI and human behaviour, is the erosion of co-operation. Civilisations can only thrive by restraining war and organised societies through their ability to coordinate at scale using language and shared institutions. That single capacity is now under attack due to war depleting the institutional layer and AI threatening the linguistic layer. Degraded human behaviour is a reshaped consequence of both.
The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at [email protected]