International Relations

aking your best point from your first paper and your best point from your second paper, write a paper as if you are an intelligence officer trying to present your position to a policymaker. You begin by presenting your most persuasive V argument for why your issue poses a threat to the United States. You are then to imagine that the policymaker disagrees with you ,and you are to present his argument in the paper. For example, if you argue that terrorism is the centra lnational security threat, imagine the policymaker disagrees with you and claims that another issue poses the greatest threat to national security in the next decadeor thatyour issue does not pose a threat to national security in the next decade. You are then to refute his/herargument.Next, you are to present your most persuasiveargument for how the intelligencecommunityshould deal with the threat. Again, the policymaker disagreesand argues that there are better waystheintelligence community can deal with the issue.Finally, you are to refute his/herposition.

ANSWER

Mutually Agreed Destruction

The IIA Research Foundation annotated that, “Information is a significant component of most organizations’ competitive strategy either by the direct collection, management, and interpretation of business information or the retention of Information for day-to-day business processing. Some of the more obvious results of IS failures include reputational damage, placing the organization at a competitive disadvantage, and contractual noncompliance. These impacts should not be underestimated.” From this dynamic and accurate postulate, it is easy to agree with the idea that Information is the most crucial component of an organization. Therefore, the information obtained should be safeguarded or protected as the first significant step in canvassing the organization from attacks that would arise due to leaks of important confidential information. With the emerging technological advancements, it is accurate to say that technology has skipped to the top of the list as the number one potential threat to national security.

With increased incidents of major system hackings, identity theft, internet theft, fraud, and unauthorized access to confidential public or private Information from government institutions, information technology, if left unchecked, will undoubtedly be a recipe for chaos on the national and international stage. With more emphasis put on artificial intelligence as a component of technology. The emergence of artificial intelligence technology has coded the world into a smaller console controlled remotely. The blossoming of intriguing developments like robotics process automation, speech recognition, decision management, AI optimized hardware, and virtual agents, among others, also provides a small window of attack by criminals, who might corrupt one or more of these systems to make a political or ideological statement that in one way or another affect the stability of peace and coordination in a nation. As an intelligence officer for over a decade now, I have seen the trends in the dramatic improvements in artificial intelligence, with even more dramatic changes in the horizon in both long and short term and the many loopholes available for exploitation by cyber goons makes this an easy target, prompting the effort to develop AI in a safe and beneficial direction. This analysis is basis enough to catapult AI as a potential threat to national security if left unchecked and regulated.

For the sake of clarification, we can go back in history and analyze the effects of the cold war. From the year 1946 to 1990, earmarking the beginning and end of the cold war, I could use this scenario to highlight the dangers of AI as a tool of war and technological advancement. In the quest for a peaceful world after the confrontation between capitalists and communists, we see the superpower nations scrambling to modernize and improve their military sectors using technology, being that the cold war did not involve actual fighting. The heightened tension between involved nations created a paranoia of some sorts that pushed them to carry on developing nuclear bombs that could be launched from thousands of miles out.

This is signified by the ever-increasing expenditure in the US government’s military sector. The breakthrough in technology enabled the use of AI as weapon automatization protocols. The military prowess of the United States of America, Russia, France, China, and the United Kingdom has always been measured by the number of nukes each state possesses. In case of an altercation, these weapons of destruction are just a button away from total annihilation. Now imagine if something of this cataclysmic nature falling into the wrong hands, even in the slightest form of accident, the results can be devastating; this calls for policymakers to realize the seriousness of AI as a potential threat to national security. It is with great fairness to say that there are other threats to national security as the policymaker refutes. Still, looking at the world now, it is not further from the truth when I say that technology has infiltrated every single sector of the economy and has even lead to an automation-spurred job loss; this creates a large population of idle people who resort to malicious activities to keep afloat, cases of hacking and fraud all emerge when there is an interference in the stability of a process. Left unchecked, this could lead to even darker tunnels.

Technology through AI in itself can affect the climate change of an area and its socioeconomic stability, more reason why keen interest should be shown in trying to combat the downsides of the use of AI and technology as a whole. Theoretically, AI looks all beautiful when it is efficient and uncorrupted. Again, consider a situation where robot cops are hacked by terrorists and reassigned to attack innocent civilians, all done remotely. Or better yet, consider a situation where all the computers are affected by a human-made virus that destroys all the critical files containing confidential state information. As I mentioned earlier, almost 90% of all the activities done today at different levels in society require the servitude of technology. Technology is life in its efficient form, and I firmly believe that life is worth protecting at all costs.

Just in case I have not driven this point home quite firmly enough, Stuart Armstrong, a researcher from the future of life institute, described AI as “an extinction risk” where it to go rogue. With much dread reserved for nuclear weapons as having the potential to kill up to 95% of the total earth’s population, with the 5% remaining on the verge of extinction due to the adverse post-attack effects, a clear example is seen in the case of world war II where the nuclear bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands of people, with the survivors having being affected by the aftermath of the bombing, these effects infiltrated the human genetic of the survivors and were even passed to the newborn babies, this right here was the first eye-opener of how dangerous AI can be to the safety of humanity, I therefore strongly recommend that AI be monitored and regulated in its development and usage, lest it is the end of us all. We live in a world that is infested by conflicts and ways. These present opportunities for rogue individuals to abuse sacred rules that have been in existence to maintain the world’s peace ant the national security of the United States of America,

Finally, as an intelligence officer, it is only prudent to suggest a few measures to minimize such risks in the event they occur. In as much as the policymaker rebuffs this specific measure, I would like to add that there are other practical ways of handling this situation before they get out of hand. However, I firmly believe that integrating internal safeguards as counterintelligence can maximize internal system control in addressing technological risks, foreseen and unforeseen, such as hacking and cyber-attacks, thus playing an essential role in addressing technological risks. These safeguards can be integrated successfully to protect data and Information hence maximizing privacy for better organization in the national government and on the international stage, through the development of innovative software, cyber counterintelligence toolkits, and an improved and safe technological infrastructure. Limiting ourselves to this single solution will surely be unwise. Various countermeasures can be put in place to ensure that we do not get to a point where all we can do is say, “I told you so.” Instead, we need to open our eyes to endless possibilities of using technology in the safest ways and more collaborative ways in an organization or a given governmental setup so as cases of attacks and technological infiltrations are reduced to their bare minimum.