The Future of Surveillance

The Director of the Future Planet Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, predicts that by 2030 the equivalent of a global PreCognition machine will be in operation with everyone  a Person of Interest as portrayed in The Minority Report film.

The state of surveillance and reconnaissance technology and its multiple applications  is now evolving at warp speed creating unprecedented Future Shock to civilisation’s social fabric.
Surveillance is already big business- very big business and is likely to continue to expand exponentially into the foreseeable future, attracting the good, the bad and the ugliest elements of society.

The problem is that without careful controls,  the runaway consequences of such a pervasive and intrusive phenomenom is likely to be catastrophic for humanity.

The main technological and social components of the  global surveillance trendline are already emerging; woven together into a dense matrix from which there will be no easy escape.

They include-

 The Knowledge Web

The most important component is the Web/Internet itself- the core asset and artefact of our civilisation, leveraging the knowledge of our society.  

This massive information network is already evolving into something beyond society’s capacity to control- the means of generating and accessing all civilisation’s knowledge content and application. It now connects over 3 billion humans and in the near future trillions of computing devices, machines and sensors. It already allows  a dense interchange of information, expertise and ideas relating to the sciences, arts and social experience that support all aspects of human existence on planet earth.

All knowledge advances, including not just basic data, but the algorithms, processes and techniques used to processs information, are being funnelled at hyperspeed into its heart, like a giant black hole swallowing the energy of billions of suns.

And emerging from the other side just like a white hole is a whole new universe- the promise of a cornucopia of untold intellectual riches and wisdom. Giant science and social observatories are now being constructed- models containing trillions of variables to assist in forecasting the future; reducing the risks that could wipe out our world in the blink of an eye- catastrophic economic, environmental or existential collapse.

The Web itself is rapidly moving to the next level- becoming more intelligent and self-determining; adapting and learning with the computational intelligence of billions of human and cyberagent minds; rapidly taking on the characteristics of a living superorganism.

 Once encapsulated, content can be mixed and matched, processed and recycled ad infinitum just like matter, until it finally emerges in a form that in  the best scenario will benefit humanity and allow it survive and achieve its potential in the future.

But there is an alter ego- a dark side to the Internet/Web. In order to achieve this magical transformation, this perpetual knowledge generator at the heart and soul of our civilisation,  it must also become a superb surveillance machine, with intelligent sensors to act as its eyes and ears- everywhere.

The following categories of sensors are now commonly used  to support the Internet/Web

Embedded Sensors-

Sensors are incredibly important, because without them to monitor the processes and systems of our planet, including our own bodies, our wonderful chocolate factory would quickly die. It  can only operate as a supersystem if it is fed a continuous diet of up to date, relevant and reliable information.

By linking to a variety of intelligent sensors, some incorporating the distributed  ability to process signals using artificial intelligence, the Web can capture the raw material it requires to weave our social matrix and is already doing so in increasing volumes, as its appetite for problem solving expands.

Sensors therefore must therefore also evolve  to become smarter- becoming more like multi-component systems, which can now be constructed in a vast variety of forms. For example- as force and field detectors embedded in the limbs of autonomous robots, capable of working on complex tasks with humans; as clouds of tiny artificial insects or smart dust that can automatically cooperate to monitor deadly environments without risking human lives; as nano-biosensors small enough to enter and navigate human cells to keep us alive; as the instrumentation of unmanned drones capable of locking on to a target and activating a kill switch against human beings; and as road location catseyes, continuously  communicating with driverless cars to avoid accidents and gridlock.

But rapidly changing climate and social change triggered by global warming will be the main driver for this technology in the future,  requiring intelligent sensors embedded in every form of natural and man made ecosystem; allowing for constant adaptation and maintenance, utilising closed feedback loops linked to the Intelligent Web for its solutions.

Such smart sensor networks are already operating in every sphere of work and social activity including-

Maintaining engineered Infrastructure- embedded in roads, bridges, dams, pipelines, grids and power stations.

Monitoring ecosystems-  natural systems  such as-forests, rivers, water, soil,  air and energy resources providing feedback to regulatory authorities to protect their integrity and survival.

Coordinating manufacturing and logistical facilities-  factories, plants,  container centres, warehouses, ports. airports, railways, traffic systems etc to efficiently manage the manufacture and delivery of products and services.

Personalising Health - advances in smart phones  and mobile technology equipped with biosensors have opened up unlimited  opportunities to monitor and support an individual’s health needs on an unprecedented personal basis- delivering just in time interventions linked to the latest diagnostic and treatment algorithms on the Web. Also using nanosensors to track disease pathways at the cellular and molecular level.

Managing Disasters and Conflict -  protecting the security  of those living in war and conflict zones – including law enforcement precincts in cities and urban areas; using a  range of sensors to protect and monitor the security of communities and public assets. These are increasingly delivered by smartphones as well as pervasive CCTV cameras, mobile robots and in the future small agile drones.

 Satellites / Probes – Eyes in  the Sky-

Ssensor systems, involving high resolution cameras and global positioning devices attached to space based telescopes, aircraft, balloons, unmanned drones, explorers  and probes of all types are now widely used to detect the electromagnetic spectrum of the planet’s resources in most wavelengths- optical, infrared, ultra violet, radio etc. The results are used to feed data to web based or smartphone apps for analysis covering-  weather forecasts, disaster interventions, animal distribution, ecosystem health, 24 hour communications and video news footage..

.Military / Spy networks - satellites track the world’s most secret military and government installations and test sites using software that enables surveillance of the remotest areas on the planet. This information is also used for research, using images from Google Earth satellite maps to replace traditional archaeological methods; by Governments to monitor border integrity and NGOs to safeguard wildlife against poaching in protected areas. Powerful probes and remote autonomous vehicle landers are increasingly used in space exploration  to obtain fly by views of planets, moons and asteroids and in the future mining options.

Drones / UAVs – these are likely to become common in the future, sharing airspace with piloted aircraft. They are currently used for surveillance spying and kill missions, but in the future will be used for reconaissance by most governments, NGOs and private corporations.

They can monitor a range of information sources, vastly reducing the operational risk in conflict areas; allowing surveillance by sensors that can record full motion video, infrared patterns. radio and mobile phone signals. They can also refuel on remote short airstrips, extending effective air range by thousands of kilometres.

Nextgen drones will be autonomous and smaller, able to navigate and eventually make target decisions, controlled by  complex algorithms and Web feeds; eliminating human operators from the decision loop entirely.  They will be used by every type of organisation - criminal networks, private security businesses, NGOs and social activist groups, providing a variety of logistical, security, news gathering and research services.

But many legal, ethical and regulatory issues remain to be resolved before UAVs will be able to operate in lockstep with human controlled vehicles. There is now fierce pushback by the community against another method of individual privacy invasion.

Intelligent Devices

With the imminent arrival of the Internet of Everything the focus will be on every object in relation to surveillance - machines, electronic devices and systems that can communicate with other machines as well as human users will be the first objects of interest to  be caught in the net. These will include complex systems such as supersmart phones and robots as well as everyday home and office devices such as  cameras, TVs, printers, video recorders, toys,  game consoles, microwave ovens, toasters, fridges etc, all equipped with forms of embedded sensors and actuators including chipped product and ID codes. Eventually  trillions of such active objects including life forms – plants,  animals and humans- will be linked to the Internet through a variety of communication protocols including including DNA sequences and brain interfaces.

Robots of all types will be pervasive in the home,  workplace and industrial areas including- humanoids, capable of intereacting and cooperating with humans in work areas such as retail stores and factories or performing home support services- initially cleaning, food delivery, health and companion support.  They will eventually be capable of more sophisticated decision-making and autonomous operation equal to humans in every activity and finally acting in surveillance / supervisory mode.

 Social Networks /Media

Humans are also expanding their remit in the surveillance game in the form of citizen reporters, scientists and observers, using smartphones to gather information from their local environment, then feeding it through social network media.  Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter already provide feedback on the latest breaking news across the globe, particularly in entertainment, crime and disaster areas, often creating ad hoc networks to provide alternative coverage when standard communication fails as in Haiti-  offering critical on the ground suppport and impact assessment as first responders.

Phone cameras have already proved the single most important surveillance tool available to communities in times of crisis;  also a tool for democracy that has already proved crucial in capturing proof of abuse during the Arab Spring. Citizen reporters, and community activists  equipped with such devices constantly feed the Web with realtime events, capturing evidence of illegal activities and promoting events of public interest through crowdsourcing. The social media therefore provides a significant back channel in disseminating realtime information around the globe like a Mexican wave, as well as signalling emerging trends such as disease epidemics and political developments.

In addition, activist NGOs, whistleblowers and mass movements- Greenpeace, Wikileaks and Occupy all contribute to this channel, providing background monitoring and surveillance of big business and  Government corruption; a form of ethical surveillance crucial to a democracy.

 Cyber Espionage

Cyber espionage is now rife around the world. Serious cyber attacks are a daily occurrence particularly between nations such as  China, US, Russia, Britain, Iran and Israel, with the intent of covert acquisition of national secrets, Intellectual property, financial assets and personal information.

But cyber espionage is also a form of intrusive surveillance.

Current cyber malware such as Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu and Miniduke are all primarily surveillance and  reconnaissance weapons capable of performing spy missions as well as crippling vital target infrastructure. This routinely involves  copying critical screen images, websites, emails, documentation and network traffic in general.- performing extensive data mining, copying, transmitting and deleting files for espionage purposes.

The Pentagon’s Plan x is a good example of the exploding surveillance syndrome now overtaking society. It aims to create a  new surveillance and operations system to map the digital battlefield of cyberspace and  define a playbook for deploying cyberweapons. It will provide a realtime graphical rendering of this cyberworld showing ongoing operations and realtime flows of networked data around the world like a large scale computer game. This visualisation or surveillance model of cyberspace requires intensive reconaissance of both friend and foe. But it is already out of date- a model more appropriate for the sci-fi films of the nineties. It will soon be superseded by a much bigger prescence – a multi-dimensional cognitive model in which  players are linked directly to the Intelligent Web.

The US is also assembling a vast intelligence surveillance apparatus to collect information about its own citizens as well as those overseas actors perceived as terrorist risks, integrating the resources of the Department of Homeland Security, military , local police departments and FBI. In the near future this will be expanded to encompass the whole range of US and overseas allied security agencies. This machine will collate information about thousands of US citizens and residents many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing, to assist the FBI initially in its ongoing eternal and surreal war against home grown terrorism.

According to news reports there are now almost 4000 federal, state and local organisations working on domestic counterterrorism projects, following the 2001 attacks. Obviously this is  getting out of hand, making it virtually impossible to achieve any realistic goal for achieving a coordinated system.

There are also a number of legislative bills relating to Internet surveillance awaiting ratification including – SOPA, PIPA and CISPA. The  first two speak to copyright protection of content on the web threatening to close down any remotely implicated site,  which opponents say infringes on the right to privacy and freedom of access to the Web; while the third  relates to the monitoring of private citizen information or spying on the general public, in the name of investigating hypothetical cyber threats and ensuring the security of networks against cyber attack.

All three have met with fierce opposition from advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union  and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as ignoring the legal rights of supposed infringers and excessively intrusive and draconian.

Future Shock

While the benefits of the future Interne/Web are enormous in terms of greater knowledge leading to a higher quality of life and a safer existence for humanity, there are concurrent significant downsides which will quickly escalate, potentially  leading to a loss of control of humanity over its destiny. 

The existential risk is that transition to such an always on and pervasive entity as a global  surveillance machine, monitoring  a large proportion of the planet’s  natural, engineered and cultural environment, could  lead to a big brother society in which everyone is a person of interest.

The major disruptions noted as already emerging, relate to the inevitable erosion of citizen privacy  and equitable access to the the Internet in the name of security, with new US laws such as SOPA  and CISPA due to be enacted. These purportably aim to provide greater protection for intellectual property and personal rights but at the same time have the potential to erode democratic rights. 

In other words the beneficial potential of the Internet/Web is at risk of being subverted, emerging instead as a vast spying or surveillance machine.

But this is just the beginning of a slippery slope in human rights attrition.

The surveillance mechanisms outlined will inevitably lead to much greater personal freedoms restriction, which in turn will increase pressure for some form of predictive capacity to choke off dissent. This is likely to escalate no matter what legal safeguards are adopted.

In the paranoid world of the spy/surveillance agencies, networks will become impossibly entangled – much more so than in the current geopolitical/security maze. If there are 4000 domestic agencies in the US currently involved in covert surveillance, how many more are there internationally and how many will there be involved in the surveillance game when the cyberespionage paranoia really explodes?

Who is friend or foe when every nation and major organisation is spying on every other?

As mentioned, prediction/forecasting models are already in widespread use – and so they should be in a world threatened by global warming and economic collapse.  Projects such as the FuturICT Social Observatory, although not gaining EU funding in the immediate future will continue, monitoring vast amounts of information, searching for trends and elusive signals to save the planet.

It is good science when forecasting is applied to reduce risks to our civiliisation. But when such mechanisms abuse power by tightening control over populations it is the beginning of an unravelling of democratic standards.

Autocratic and fascist states throughout history have applied such techniques to their people, punishing political enemies and dissidents in the process. The current surveillance technologies amplify this potential for misuse a thousandfold, exploiting the Web as civilisation’s greatest asset for potential benefit, turning it instead into a quasi Surveillance/Precog machine with the capacity to predict an individual’s movements and actions.

Governments have lost the ability to solve this problem.

Even if there is the will it has become too complex.

The Future is at a tipping point- and the outcome does not look promising.

The Future of Human Survival

it is proposed that the future survival of humans on Planet Earth, now threatened by global warming, will depend instead on the immediate implementation of three key actions-

A Mandate for Global Cooperation

Co-option of the Power of the Internet/Web

Immediate Implementation of Mega-Baseload sustainable energy projects  

Steinbeck’s harrowing narrative – Of Mice and Men and the devastating power of the recent hurricane Sandy, have a great deal in common.

The current powerlessness of humanity in the face of global warming related natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy is a wakeup call for the future direction of a civilisation heading towards oblivion.

Steinbeck’s novel portrayed two displaced migrant ranch workers and their dream of settling down on their own piece of land during the great depression- only to find that their best laid plans go awry and their aspirations end in disaster.

And so it is with humanity’s benign view of nature tailored to human aspirations; but now shown to be a mirage, as climate change in the form of roiling extreme events demonstrates the powerlessness of human society when faced with the overwhelming might of  environmental catastrophes.

And when the causes are proven to be primarily human induced, except to diehard climate deniers, then it is vital to address those causes before our dreams of a vibrant future civilisation vanish in the blink of a cosmic eye.

According to the recent climate report commissioned by the World Bank, humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of essential ecosystems; resulting in the extinction of numerous animal and plant species and widespread starvation, coupled with the displacement of tens of millions of people in coastal  areas and an explosion of diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever.  The report states that the resulting massive storms, floods, droughts, blizzards and heat waves will wipe out whole cities and communities, eventually leading to widespread conflict, which could cause the destruction of the fragile fabric of democratic society.

Also according to new forecast data from the Global Carbon Project, released at the Doha climate conference and published in Nature magazine, the world is on track to become an ‘unrecognizable planet’, with temperatures reaching between four and six degrees by the end of the century.

Since 1990 carbon emissions have increased by over fifty percent, not including the projected release of huge amounts of methane from the thawing of Arctic ecosystems. According to NASA estimates, although the climate has changed due to natural influences in the past, human generated emissions imposed on top of this variation is now driving change twenty times faster than pre-industrial times.

So what can be done?

Any plan to save the planet and its life cargo must incorporate the following immediate implementation of three key actions –

·        Mandate Global Cooperation

·        Co-opt the Power of the Internet/Web

·        Implement Baseload Sustainable Energy Projects  

Global Cooperation

This is essential and obvious. No one nation or group can succeed in halting climate change, without the cooperation of the majority of other nations, particularly the heavy carbon emitters such as the US and China.

Actions in one location will inevitably have repercussions to varying degrees in all others.

Gradually humans in all countries are realising that only through cooperation on a global scale can they effectively survive the major threats to their survival in the future. In the areas of health, technology, agriculture, trade, environmental management and disaster relief, global partnerships are beginning to make a significant difference to the lives of the disadvantaged.

Global cooperation will also involve strengthening the democratic process in those autocratic states that do not reflect the true will of its population. Those nations that do not wish to cooperate, including free riders, should be excluded from other economic benefits, such as sharing in climate research and trade assistance.

Global warming and its impact on the ecosystems and biodiversity of the planet is one of the most critical areas where cooperative research is essential. With the very survival of the planet at stake, conserving ecosystems and the services they provide such as maintaining clean air and water, is now seen as vital to human self-interest and survival. A number of climate change related cooperative networks have already been established to track impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, agriculture, and disease spread, using earth orbiting satellites.

Until comparatively recently, managing resources, infrastructure and catastrophes has been largely an ad hoc affair run on a country rather than regional or global basis. This is not surprising considering the evolution of our civilization, which has been based on a largely competitive, winner-take-all model between individuals, organizations, cities and nation-states.

Over the last few decades however a realization has dawned that this is an extremely inefficient and counterproductive approach and totally unsustainable in the modern carbon-induced warming era. Although still operating in largely fragmented mode, humans are beginning to mobilise cooperatively, creating global research consortiums, trade and business alliances and knowledge exchange networks.

In summary- global warming is now perceived as the dominant threat to humans and our present civilisation. This will manifest increasingly in more extreme events such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, blizzards and heat waves, putting at risk the sustainability of the planet’s fresh water, food, air and infrastructure.

In addition, rising sea levels will put at risk two thirds of the world’s major cities and most low lying coastal areas. Loss of biodiversity will put at risk the integrity of fragile ecosystems and dependent food chains. Increases in deadly diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will put at risk human life on a grand scale. In worst case scenarios the risk of escalating chaos and conflict will spread globally, across both developing and developed countries.

The Doha climate change conference, with delegates from 194 countries, is committed to building on the achievements of the previous three conferences, in Copenhagen, Cacun and Durban- by reducing climate change gas emissions, setting up a $100 billion fund to assist developing countries adapt and implementing an emission reduction verification system.

But without an enforceable plan it is highly unlikely that global average temperature rises will be limited to 2 degrees by 2030, as has been documented by the IPCC and World Bank reports.

Fossil fuel useage continues to accelerate, driven largely by the growth imperatives of both developed and developing economies; and according to a recent UN report has increased by 20 percent since 2000.  As a result temperatures are expected to breach the two percent threshold by 2030 and climb beyond four degrees by the end of the century.

In which case it’s game over!

Regardless of the immediate causes of global warming- man made or so-called natural variability, much greater preparation for the coming profound changes to our planet needs to be addressed now, at both the technological and social level.

Tomorrow is far too late.

Over the past 50 years the world’s population has almost doubled to 7 billion, global consumption of food and fresh water has more than tripled, fossil fuel use has quadrupled and vertebrates have declined by over thirty percent. And now we are running at 150% of the planet’s sustainable resource capacity.

It is therefore clear that managing the planet’s capacity to provide life with a future is the paramount goal that must focus all humanity’s skills, creativity and knowledge, from now into the far future. The current methodology of trying to reach a consensus on emission reduction strategies on a country by country basis, boosted by yearly conferences, is far too slow. With a timeframe of 100 years it might have been doable, but time has now run out and the looming cost of failure is incalculable.

To survive, the pieces of this jigsaw now need to be joined into a coherent whole. This is too critical a matter to delay- waiting for politicians, business leaders and bureaucrats to reach consensus. The inertia in the social system has to be cut through, just like the Gordian knot, by a groundswell of grassroots action, starting with a coalition of committed social activist groups.

A new framework, unfettered by the inertia of history is essential.

 Co-opting the Power of the Web

A tipping point is rapidly approaching when all the drivers of global warming will converge and rapidly escalate uncontrollably including- the release of deadly methane from the warming tundra; melting of the polar ice sheets causing drastic ocean current changes and coastal inundation; loss of key animal and plant species triggering the collapse of the fragile ecosystems and the web of life.

There are still uncertainties in the complex modelling of hundreds of climate related variables, but the critical benchmarks and limits are now agreed by all countries.

Adaptation is the critical word. But while the Governments of developed countries are bickering over emission levels, individuals, NGOs, communities, enterprises, cities and regions are acting. They are establishing renewable energy projects on a massive scale- using solar, wind and biofuels to power homes and the Grid; harvesting run-off water in urban areas; switching to crops better suited to hotter, drier and saltier conditions; adopting strategies to adapt to coastal inundation; changing to public and alternate transport; building more energy-efficient buildings and infrastructure.

A massive mind shift is occurring across the planet, triggered by this global crisis. A more intelligent, cooperative and creative process is evolving.

There is now an urgent need to harness   and amplify this process, applying the full data resources and intelligence of the Web to coordinate and manage major programs relating to global warming and survival of the planet and human civilization.

A global clearing-house of climate information needs to be urgently established to keep communities informed on the local ramifications as well as global impacts to their environment as well as the optimal basis to proceed. This will involve applying the best science, intelligence and adaptive technologies to each problem area.

The global science, technological and engineering databases are available to achieve this- right now. They just need to be effectively linked; not too hard one would have thought when the lives of 7 billion people and the welfare of the planet and life itself are at stake.

Local specialists in each region and country, coordinated by UN global teams such as the IPCC would gather and feed all relevant climate change data into the web on a continuous basis, much of it autonomously from satellite and sensor sources; harnessing its enormous computational intelligence to deliver a constantly updated series of forecasts and mitigating options. These could then be authorised and acted upon at the relevant community level, eventually also autonomously, bypassing inefficient modes of hierarchical decision-making with inherent conflicts of interest. This is no time for the niceties of perfect consensus – it is survival at its rawest as in any war.

There is also a vital need to better understand the global social interrelationships enmeshing the society in which we live and the effect that these have on the planet as a whole. We also need to know how to leverage the benefits of global social systems, while at the same time limiting any downsides they may generate.

Both the environmental and social analysis will include deploying sophisticated predictive models of unprecedented scope and complexity as projected by the European FuturICT project. Labelled- 'Reality Mining', the plan is to gather information about every aspect of the living planet including its life-forms and use it to simulate the behaviour and evolution of entire ecosystems and economies; helping predict and prevent future potential crises. The Living Earth Simulator is expected to predict for example, potential economic bubbles, impacts of global warming, pandemics and conflicts and how to best mitigate them.

The focus is on preparing for a smarter future for planet earth- creating solutions for managing more efficiently and reliably the world’s infrastructure, energy, food, water and health. This will be achieved through harnessing the immense power of advanced artificial intelligence, mathematical, computational, information and communication, control and modelling techniques.

The FuturICT project has the potential to nucleate and accelerate this process, operating as an essential catalyst and mobiliser for managing our future. But there are many other advanced projects with the potential to complement this grand design and working in parallel to help complete the big picture; in essence coordinating and focusing the entire knowledge base and mind-power of our civilisation as a global organism- a superorganism.

This must implemented as a world- wide public project, in the same manner as the Internet and Web; with each component of the planet’s intellectual mosaic- individuals, research groups, corporations and governments, contributing and mining their knowledge resources- each according to their creative capacity and expertise.

Such a global vision is too fundamentally vital and complex to be funnelled through private organisations, politicians or states. It must instead function as a self-organising supra-national entity- evolving eventually as a largely autonomous system.

Managing the planet therefore will involve the massive task of coordinating thousands of techniques, technologies, systems and initiatives to gain the maximum leverage within the timescale available.

Copenhagen demonstrated the difficulty in gaining consensus even for the essential task of implementing a global carbon trading system - but now we must go much further and coordinate all our intellectual capacity.

But time is precious. The Doha climate talks must mark the beginning of the end of further procrastination.

So is this a feasible proposition? Yes, but only by applying adaptive, autonomic system technology, capable of responding dynamically to changes in the physical and social environment. Such a system will need to include the ability to self-organise and self-optimise its planning and operations – to discover, innovate, simulate, create, predict, apply, learn and continuously gain intelligence- to ensure optimal outcomes.

It is increasingly evident that there is only one practical mechanism to ensure the ultimate success of such a gargantuan endeavour- harnessing the intelligence of the Web itself. It must be nurtured and engineered to become self-organising and self-adaptive partner in this process, in order to reach the goal of managing a sustainable future- essential for us and our planet.

The computational and engineering technologies are available and feasible today, but the willpower and capacity to subvert nationalistic rivalries is in short supply.

But the stark truth is that without such determination, humanity is doomed. 

 Implementing Mega- Energy Projects

The solar energy absorbed by the earth’s oceans, atmosphere and land in less than two hours is more than the total energy the world uses in a year.

Solar technology is therefore a contender- ready and waiting to displace a large chunk of fossil fuel dependency. Just as it seemed that the mega fossil fuel producers of coal, natural gas and oil would drive Planet Earth over the carbon cliff, major advances in the efficiency and cost of solar power along with wind and biofuels is ramping up, particularly in countries such as China and Germany.  .

A massive surge in research and innovation has pushed solar energy to the point where crossover from fossil to renewable energy is feasible, for most domestic, transport and light industrial applications, within the next few years. And the technology is also now available for building base load industrial power plants within the next decade.

There’s no choice about making the switch if humans are to survive. The latest news from Doha tells us that unequivocally. The US has just experienced one of the most extreme droughts and heat waves in its history leading to grain shortages globally, as well, one of the most violent hurricanes in US history wiping out the low lying areas of Manhattan with a massive storm surge.

And this is just the beginning of a world that we won’t recognise by 2050 if we don’t adapt. But on the bright side a number of industrial base load energy projects are already under development including-

In Africa-

Desertec –part of the Great African Grid- a proof of concept project based in Morocco, aiming to supply 15% of Europe’s energy from the solar power of the Saharan desert- and

Medgrid- another North African project linking solar and wind farms, with 20GW of generating capacity of which 5GW would be exported to Europe.

In Europe-

These and other renewable energy projects will in turn become components of a future European SuperGrid, channelling renewable energy across North Africa, the Middle East and Europe; serving as the backbone of a larger European SuperSmart Grid.

Countries such as Germany are now leading the charge in solar technology manufacturing, as well as other renewables such as wind which is becoming widely used across Europe. Germany already generates 4% of its energy from solar power. On a sunny day this can increase to over 35%, including energy from a million solar panels on houses, buildings and the sides of highways: more solar panels than rest of world combined. It is expected to be 100% renewable energy dependent by 2050.

Spain took the lead in Europe as one of the most advanced countries in the development of solar energy, with a major solar thermal project up and running with a capacity of 3.5GW and by 2020 expects to have an installed generating capacity of 10,000MW.

In the Middle East-

In Saudi Arabia, which is the largest exporter of crude oil, and like Abu Dhabi and Qatar uses a lot of its fossil fuels to power desalination plants, the tide is turning. It has announced a $109 billion plan to create a solar industry based on thermal concentrated solar power- CSP, to generate a third of the nation’s electricity by 2032, focussing the sun with mirrors to drive turbines and storing the energy in molten salts. With this technology the Saudis could export solar energy for next twenty centuries.

Along with 16 other industrialised emerging economies Qatar has signed the agreement on establishment of the Global Green Growth Institute and announced at Doha that it will invest $20 billion in a 1,800 megawatt solar energy plant.

In Asia-

China leads the world market in the manufacture of green economy products in solar and wind, with a huge push to reduce carbon intensity, recently achieving a reduction in fossil based electricity generating emissions of 9%.

Other Asian countries including India are likely to follow China’s lead.

But as well as breakthroughs in technology, a major driver for adoption of renewables is the shift towards sustainable architectures for urban living. The recent advances in solar technologies referred to below, are ideally placed to support this evolution.  

Within ten years the impact of global warming will dominate city planning and architecture. Buildings will be designed to conserve energy, with surfaces utilising flexible thin film and organic solar panels and most surfaces will be utilised to collect runoff water to support sustainable horticulture. 

Efficiency and recycling savings of the order of 30% of today’s levels will be available from the application of smart adaptive technologies in power grids, communication, distribution and transport networks, manufacturing plants and consumer households. Garbage will be totally recycled, with organic waste generating significant levels of methane energy for local heating, lighting and food production. Excess capacity will be fed to the major power grids, providing a constant re-balancing of energy supply across the world.

A new generation of  solar technologies is now positioned to mesh with this revolution and includes advances in solar photovoltaics, nano-materials, advanced thermal power generation, thin film surface coatings and artificial photosynthesis- to name a few.

These advances portend economies of scale, efficiency and cost that will soon begin to challenge the economics of fossil fuels, and be capable of supporting commercial applications- quite apart from the small issue of saving humanity from a Venusian future.

Solar and wind alone have the potential to support the world’s domestic and industrial energy requirements. Deserts and heat radiation will continue to increase in a world of global warming and should be seen as assets rather than liabilities.

With sufficient clean energy and the requisite technological, engineering and scientific knowledge, together with a funding and carbon pricing mechanism equivalent to 1% of global GDP, civilisation and the planet’s biosphere can survive. Already a Robin Hood Tax has been mooted at Doha to boost the Climate Change Fund- a tax on financial transactions to help those countries most vulnerable to climate change. Such measures have set the precedent for a future Climate Change survival levy on all nations.

As mentioned, base load power plants capable of supporting industry and the needs of major cities are already being established on each major continent in desert areas, supplemented if necessary by wind on both coastal and inland high airflow areas and biofuels generated from waste products and bacteria.

These could be fully operational within the next decade and linked to major grid infrastructure if a global cooperative focus could be achieved.

The availability of fresh water would follow. Storms and heavy flooding will be an increasingly common phenomena in our future world.  In cities much of this water can be collected from rooftop and street surfaces and recycled. In country areas it can be more efficiently damned and channelled into giant wetland reservoirs and existing river catchment systems without further destructive damning, where it can also replenish natural ancient aquifers.

For populations near the coast, vast quantities of sea water including in flooded river deltas, can be purified using the latest low energy reverse osmosis desalination technology. If energy is cheap and inexhaustible, water from ocean desalination can also be piped inland for major irrigation projects.

With sufficient energy and water, many horticultural crops can adapted and farmed intensively along with chickens and pigs near cities- even fish, if the oceans are too acidic.

The world’s resources are now running on empty, mainly because we continue to use fossil instead of renewable fuels. We are slow learners, with the problems of pollution and the economics of greed tied to an obsolete economic model of never ending growth and waste.

Most ancient civilisations collapsed because of prolonged droughts despite ingenious catchment, storage and irrigation systems. The limitations of those first civilisations can now be overcome despite huge population increases if the inexhaustible energy of the sun can be efficiently harnessed and our greed curtailed.

It appears that the inertia and resistance from existing fossil fuel industries- big oil, coal and gas and their acolytes, is a greater impediment to change than technological barriers and is sufficient to stymy such initiatives, even when society is on life support.

The stakes are so high in fact that it’s really no contest, especially when early prototype megaprojects are already up and running with proven sustainable energy technology.

What’s more important- limiting the power of an industry or nation – even powerful ones such as big oil or the US- or losing the planet and our children forever?

If the human race and its civilisation is to survive it has to make this choice and switch to a sustainable future immediately- without further hesitation.

It will mean putting aside a number of cherished but now irrelevant and in the present crisis, dangerous myths- primarily that any one industry, group or nation is more important than any other.

Europe despite the Eurozone crisis has shown that it’s possible for different nations to live in peace and harmony after thousands of years of conflict. If Europe can do it and has done it for over 50 years, then why not the world?

The US is a major impediment because of its insane and arrogant notion that it is still the pre-eminent alpha nation.  In a future cooperative multipolar world it will have to give up the idea that its goals or citizen’s aspirations are more important than those of Denmark or Latvia or New Zealand.

Big War will have to go as well. Major conflicts have been gradually winding down as democracy has increased. This evolution will just have to speed up.  Once global warming starts, there will be no more budgets for wars or fighting.  As the real carnage of global warming kicks in, countries such as China and the US will have to become allies, allocating all their wealth to maintaining critical infrastructure, food and civil security for the wellbeing of their populations. In such a world cooperation will be far more effective than competition for survival.

And so, as in Steinbeck’s fable ‘Of Mice and Men’, human society will always need to be humbled by the realisation that no matter how advanced its future becomes technologically, there will always be limits to its hubris, which if not heeded, may quickly turn dreams into nightmares.  

The Future of Services

The Director of the Future Planet Research Centre, David Hunter Tow, predicts that the current explosion of new services will trigger the biggest treasure hunt in the history of computing technology.

The Services Sector is currently in turmoil with thousands of startup companies cashing in on new opportunities to re-engineer traditional ways of doing business- and this is just the beginning.
Every process is currently being transformed into a new service- not just in traditional service sectors such as retail, media, education, healthcare, tourism and finance, but also in industry areas such as manufacturing- with made to order 3D printing techniques, medical processing- offering personalised DNA sequencing and diagnostics instantly on an iPhone chip, and inexpensive solar energy and water purification systems cheaply available for domestic use in developing countries.  

There’s not one established service process that’s not being seriously disrupted by smaller more agile independent players, leaving the lumbering giants that once dominated commerce in the 20th century stumbling blindly in their wake.

All major service sectors are currently being carved up, their key functions hived off and new innovations successfully introduced in competition with those of the original gatekeepers, continuing to guard their crumbling IP parapets, while new knowledge is generated by the terabyte.

What is catalysing this frenzy and where is it heading?

A number of convergent factors are involved in this 21^st century phenomenon – breakthroughs in new technology- mobile computing, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and information analysis,  massive social change in the form of deregulation of knowledge generation and access spurred on by the social media and global Web; and an unstoppable surge in the creative potential of a new generation steeped since birth in the cyber revolution, but now cheaply available; all combined with the very low cost of market entry for innovative entrepreneurs.

Of course online retail and marketing started the ball rolling in the nineties and has never looked back. Traditional main street bricks and mortar retail has been fighting a ferocious rearguard action, but by and large it’s been a losing battle ever since. The smart retailers hedged their bets by combining new boutiques and online websites, but overall, new leaders in the revolution such as Amazon, eBay, Apple and Google as well as thousands of smaller specialists, just kept upping the ante with greater global choice, faster service delivery and deeper discounts.

Then came the new wave of targeted retail service apps nibbling away at the leaders- companies like Foursquare peddling Deals of the Day- but now over 130,000 Android and 300,000 Apple apps covering- self-checkout, barcode scanning, loyalty programs, coupon and discount offers, retail location discovery, best buys, augmented reality advertising, customer reviews, consumer preferences and recommendations and mobile platform payment functions- all making the online and store shopping experience easier and more exciting. And for developers- the social media to inexpensively promote them.

In the meantime the traditional Media and Advertising industries were hurting. Gone were the salad days of broadsheets generating the golden streams of classified advertising revenue from job, real estate and used car advertisements; paying for the packed newsrooms and inflated expense accounts in five star global hot spots.  

In their place one stop outsourced stories and editorials with duplicated online headlines.

Again a frenzy of online experimentation began. But pay walls had only limited success, even for the heavyweights such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Classified and banner advertising continued to haemorrhage, migrating to web sites at greatly reduced prices and the social and alternative media led by a myriad young independent operators, grabbing the best headlines and news stories via cheap phones.

As a result the print operators such as News Ltd are only pale shadows of their former selves and have quietly retreated to the more glamorous world of cable television and film. But this is only a temporary reprieve as the low budget independent film and documentary makers gain ground on YouTube and in Arthouse cinema seats, shooting with low cost video cameras,  while at the same time chasing the more interesting reality footage; all supported by the citizen journalists and freelance bloggers desperate for a voice in the brave new cyber world.

As a result of this revolution the power of traditional media services has seriously waned and is likely to have largely disappeared within a few decades, replaced by countless personalised web channels and DVD and gaming startups, controlled by myriad smaller, more energised groups and individuals.

At the same time the Advertising industry is in a monumental bind- caught in the headlight glare of change; trying to find the magic brand formula for clients by mixing and matching the traditional and burgeoning new media- but apart from reverting to Google and Facebook, not having a lot of success with either, unable to capitalise effectively on the thousands of creative local specialists and the cornucopia of apps.

Over time traditional advertising will therefore become less significant to major brands as it transitions to an infotainment format, with thousands of independent product sites and apps providing instant comparative advice to consumers without the retrospin of big business.

Education

But the big revolution in services- the game changer of the 21^st century, will come from easy global access via mobile online learning to high quality inexpensive education. This, according to educators, will turn every mobile phone into a knowledge portal and return education to the golden age of sharing ideas among communities of scholars, releasing them from a boring classroom environment with second rate lecturers more interested in their next overseas conference schedule.
Interestingly the revolution is being led from the inside by some of the biggest and most hallowed institutions- Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale. Suddenly global tertiary level courseware and soon secondary level as well, is available at very low cost from these prestige US universities through massive online platforms such as Coursera; while third party reference sites across the Web such as Wikipedia, Google, Microsoft and Facebook plus a host of talented independent specialists will provide countless training services by integrating and coordinating domain related knowledge.
This is the next phase in the democratisation of the world’s storehouse of information, driven by the need to realise the potential of the vast under-educated populations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East that have missed out on the planet’s opportunities. It will allow anyone with a mobile phone or tablet to access the same level of knowledge regardless of location, income or the availability of local training resources. 
Over the coming decades therefore the services of learning and education will undergo a profound shift, from the traditional classroom/face to face method of knowledge transfer to a much more abstract model, where teaching will be largely separated from its current physical infrastructure, such as classrooms and campuses.

It will also be linked to the Cyber Revolution- transforming the world’s knowledge base into a vibrant multimedia forum- using the latest 3D, virtual reality and gaming technologies- all delivered by smart mobile and embedded multi-media kinetic devices linked to the Intelligent Web.

 

Healthcare

Now the medical and healthcare services sector is also ripe for revolution. Phone apps are increasingly available to act as remote monitors for home based medical and health support purposes- the remote diagnosis of life threatening conditions and algorithms to calculate correct drug dosages and interventions for acute illnesses such as diabetes, malaria  and HIV.  
This revolution has been driven to a large extent by the healthcare needs of half the planet’s population that still live in dire poverty, unable to afford traditional life-saving hospital support or medication.

These and many other diagnostic  and treatment services are now putting patients at the centre of the management of their own healthcare with the help of trained volunteers, bypassing the bottlenecks involved in the traditional delivery of medical services by scarce qualified practitioners.

Future services will also be based on the accessibility of whole-of-life eHealth records across both the developed and developing world, eventually allowing the creation of online global health records from pre-birth to death, providing personalised remote support services delivered on an iPhone or community personal computer. Within a decade, health records will include the sequencing of an individual’s genome as a vital diagnostic service at a cost of a few dollars.

A number of other technological breakthroughs will mark the expansion of new healthcare services within the next few decades including - stem cell therapies to repair human tissue and organs, reversing heart disease for example;  prevention of cancers and neurodegenerative diseases such as  breast cancer and Alzheimer’s;  sensory repair such as early retinal and corneal implants; prosthetics including neuron-controlled limbs; brain/ nervous system interfaces, overcoming spinal paralysis using brain signals; and interactive humanoid robots to provide human companionship and physical support.

All will be available as relatively inexpensive services once the enabling technologies have been approved. Why? Because if the major healthcare companies don’t provide them at  an affordable price, entrepreneurial groups will, as occurred with the generic drug revolution in developing countries when Big Pharma refused to drop their prices.

 

Finance/Banking

The Finance and Banking industry has been a sitting duck for radical change for a long time- getting bigger and more obese with minimal outside competition – seeking to control ever more functions in a frenzy of greed- from investment, transaction processing, payments, exotic specialist derivatives, consumer credit, foreign exchange, mortgage provision, money transfers, advice on mergers, trading and anything else that shows a hint of making easy money and inflating their balance sheets. 

There have been numerous exposures of the underlying level of corruption within the finance and banking industries, to the point of defrauding their own customers and incurring horrendous trading losses by rogue dealers through sloppy oversight, in the process threatening bankruptcy for themselves and their clients and culminating in the GFC.  But it didn’t deter them for long and despite some fresh regulations and a massive infusion of taxpayer dollars, their insatiable greed continued to explode.

But if government regulators have failed to reign them in - a number of agile competitors offering cheaper, safer and more convenient services, may do the job for them.

The major looming battle is between the traditional finance industry and the global technology giants such as Apple, Google and Paypal- using their skills at creating innovative software to provide Payment and Credit card services, using wireless apps that allow mobile phones to store loyalty and credit card information, make payments and transfer money. Technology-poor African countries such as Kenya have taken the lead in these services of convenience and already provide perfectly viable phone money transfer services via text, bypassing expensive banking services.

Now the bloated goliaths are fighting back with their own brand apps. Banks are also using contactless near field technology to convert smartphones into mobile credit and payment devices. But it may already be too late as the genie has escaped the bottle and the smart entrepreneurs realise the banking emperor has no clothes, except Wall-Mart hand me downs.

It is likely that banks in their present form will cease to exist within the decade, effectively disembowelled by smarter consumer and business service providers. They may become primarily back office transaction processors and routine mortgage providers, with a veneer of  deal making, offering a line of credit for smaller uncomplicated businesses. All other functions will become the province of highly skilled specialists.

And so the frenzy of creativity and service disruption will continue in all areas of commerce and industry, as the current generation of software engineers and innovators becomes acutely aware that the rules that propped up the old corporate structures are obsolete.

The old software guard that controlled the boundaries of commerce so tightly are also increasingly ripe for the picking because the original rules governing old sectors such as retail, media, manufacturing, banking, pharmaceuticals, photography, music, publishing etc, just don’t hold up anymore. They don’t reflect the changing social currents of the new era, stuck in the quicksand of the past. Therefore the software and systems houses that propped them up and contributed to their stranglehold, such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, HP, Yahoo, Cisco etc, are also irrelevant, weighed down by their own legacy technologies, now being systematically cannibalised by more agile and visionary players. 

Take any industry. Who buys the software that was developed for it in the 80’s or even 90’s? Very few, except the dinosaurs locked in by exorbitant long term maintenance agreements and they are now paying a very high price for their conformity- unable to adapt or switch systems before being swallowed by the next wave of innovation. Their present systems just don’t reflect the changing way of doing business or social norms that the new generation of consumers want and have come to expect.

The technology keeps shifting and each time it moves it exposes the soft underbelly of the existing services and providers. Those like IBM that have survived have had to radically remodel their businesses. In the case of IBM – from hardware to software to services and now jumping on the ‘smart planet’ mantra.

The next generation of providers- Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook along with thousands of smaller service developers have already moved in on these crumbling bastions.  But even this new order are in turn being held to account by a host of smaller creative startups. And no matter how often the established leaders of any systems generation try to reinforce their monopolies by swallowing the smaller more agile enterprises, they are constantly outflanked by the tide of new knowledge and innovation.

And so the dance goes on – faster and faster and the treasure trove of potentially lucrative services keeps growing.

 

Future of Cyberwars- War of the Worlds

The author provides an analysis of the striking similarities between the 19^th century H G Wells narrative- War of the Worlds and the CyberWar scenarios now looming a hundred years later between nations on Earth.

The War of the Worlds - a science fiction novel written by H G Wells in 1895-97, tells of the invasion of Earth by an alien race of Martians. It is one of the earliest stories that forecasts a major conflict between humans and a species of technologically advanced aliens.

The storyline can be interpreted in a number of ways – but generally it provides a glimpse of a dystopian future in which forces of evil threaten to destroy human civilisation through the use of superior technology without regard to the planet’s inhabitants.

In terms of today’s cyber advances the storyline now seems rather naïve, but its influence over a hundred years ago was immense; combining the shock of new technology with rampant terrorism and the threat of annihilation. It spawned half a dozen feature films, radio dramas, comic book adaptations and a television series. But its main impact remains the terror that can be inflicted on a population by unknown forces outside human control.

Today humankind finds itself on the cusp of another War of the Worlds. But this time it’s far more terrifying and real. Instead of an alien species wielding weapons of mass destruction, the main protagonists are superpowers wielding equally destructive cyber weapons, with the forces of good and evil becoming increasingly blurred.  

Now with the leaked admission that the Obama administration authorised development and implementation of the Stuxnet virus in conjunction with Israel, and probably the subsequent development of a much more dangerous virus- Flame,  the War of Worlds scenario may be beginning all over again.

Stuxnet was designed to covertly sabotage the operation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment centrifuges- around a fifth of the total used for the separation of radioactive isotopes, slowing down the Iranian nuclear program. But the virus inadvertently leaked to the wider Internet allowing cyber security agencies to disembowel its modus operandi.

Flame is apparently a much more ambitious and dangerous worm, which has been stalking super sensitive information on the net for several years, primed to spy on and steal information from computers, initially across the Middle East.  In the process it performs extensive data mining- copying, transmitting and deleting files for espionage purposes at will. The code’s malicious actions went undetected by 43 antivirus programs before finally being outed.

This massive computer worm- around 20Mb of code, has been designed more as a complete malware ecosystem than a single virus, even rumoured to contain its own App store which can be customised and mutated to attack different applications and achieve different goals.

Most significantly Flame appears to be part of a continuing State sponsored hit campaign against Iran and other perceived enemies of the free world, using a different team of programmers and platform from Stuxnet, but commissioned by the same covert agency- likely the NSA in the US, It shares several hallmark features of its predecessors- Stuxnet and Duqu and was probably  tested at Dimona – the HQ of Israel’s atomic weapons development site.

Like Duqu , Flame is primarily a reconnaissance weapon, able to copy screen images , websites, emails and network traffic and according to the Russian based Kaspersky Security Lab currently dissecting the virus, it has infected around 1000 computers. Iran confirmed that computers belonging to several high ranking officials appear to have also been penetrated by Flame.

One of its best tricks was to initiate a so-called Collision attack on the Microsoft Terminal Services encryption algorithm. This allows it to spoof the Microsoft Digital Certificate signing service by simulating a legitimate security update from Microsoft, using a cheat code to install entire copies of malicious code automatically.

But Flame’s real significance lies not just in its potential to perform spy missions and cripple specialised target machines such as centrifuges, but its capacity to destroy national infrastructure and engineering/manufacturing systems in general. This is what differentiates it from a less potent weapon of espionage and escalates it to an all-out agent of war. Its sheer breadth of functionality sets it apart.

Flame is therefore a precursor of the next-gen virtual machines of destruction in a world which is already primed for conflict!

Whoever is controlling Flame has now ordered it to self-destruct and erase all traces of its existence to avoid risk of its escape into cyberspace like Stuxnet, as well as prevent duplication of its code by outsiders. 

According to experts, a self-immolation or "suicide" module can locates every Flame file on disk, removing it and then overwriting the disk with random characters to prevent anyone obtaining information about the original infection.

But too late. It is already in the hands of numerous security experts and probably criminal and Black Hat groups as well. So it is only a matter of time before a new improved mutant version of Flame appears.

And this process of enhancement will continue with ever-escalating frequency.

Pandora’s cyber box has now been prized open, with the Obama administration being accused of human rights failures on two fronts. First the use of drones to arbitrarily assassinate state enemies and now its use of covert cyber actions to disable enemy infrastructure.

This failure of US moral standing has immense consequences for the world as a whole.

Now all bets are off and an era of global Cyberwars has been unleashed – unstoppable even if wiser heads realise the immensity of the risk it presents to future world peace and  stability.

The strategists at the Pentagon and NSA have broken a cardinal rule.

They have assumed that information and knowledge can be contained and controlled in the same way as warships, jet fighters and high tech weaponry. But information is not like guns. It inevitably leaks- particularly in the new digital age, regardless of how many Top Secret stamps and digital certificates are placed on it.  Any covert virus no matter how well camouflaged will inevitably reveal itself as it spreads via the Internet and the Planet’s networks, acting as a template for future incursions .

Criminal cartels, terrorist groups and rogue states- in fact any group that can harness the talents of gifted software specialists can now play with the same toys as the big boys. Size doesn’t matter anymore!!

This is simple physics and is why the US’s obsessive paranoia relating to the Bradley Manning and Wikileaks prosecutions is also doomed to rebound in the longer term. If anyone is to blame for massive leaks such as CableGate, it’s the US government and its incredibly sloppy information containment and access protocols; allowing a low level administrative clerk access to data which supposedly is inimical to national security- able to be routinely copied to a lady Gaga CD.

Now it’s happened all over again with the release of the Stuxnet and Flame viruses.

But apart from the blatant hypocrisy and buck passing involved in this otherwise theatre of the absurd, the information would have eventually leaked regardless.  And the argument that it is in the national interest for citizens not to know how their governments are spoofing the other side- aka diplomacy- is also a remnant of medieval times.

With the admission that the use of cyber technology against a State enemy was approved from the President’s Office down, blow-back has begun. Every nation, friendly or otherwise will now develop a similar capability and use it if necessary for its own strategic purposes.

This is not an overly difficult or expensive exercise. Every country such as- Israel, Estonia, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela and Somalia already has access to the same equally creative and intelligent minds as the US and often more so. Any State or organisation for that matter can establish a group of twenty or so elite software engineers and replicate Flame or a more potent version of it in the same timeframe. In the recent global CyberOlympics the Netherlands came first, while in the Cyber Defence University challenge 2011, Russian and Chinese teams from St Petersburg and Zhejianc trounced the elite US colleges. 

The roadmap to full blown Cyberwars is now clear to see.

Cybercrime is the precursor of Cyberwar. It is a relatively new phenomenon but because of its recent scale and game-changing implications for both government and industry it has rapidly become the dominant risk theme of the 21st century.

The opportunity for cyber attacks grows daily as corporations and governments continue to amass information about individuals in complex networks across the Web and at the same time new generations of cyber activists, some motivated purely by money and others by the desire to expose and destabilise corporations and governments, continue to hack into organisational secrets.

In a recent Norton Cybercrime Report, it was reported that breaches of various types claimed 431 million adult victims last year, with 73% of adults in the US alone incurring estimated financial losses of $US140 billion. As a criminal activity, cyber incursion is now almost as lucrative as the illegal drug trade. The total cost last year, including lost productivity and direct cash losses resulting from cyber intrusions associated with viruses, malware and identity theft is estimated at $US 388 billion.

The security firm McAfee also in a recent report, listed a range of cybercrime technologies deployed including- denial of service attacks, malware, spam, phishing, social site engineering, mobile phone viruses, botnets and phone sms Trojan messages. Also more recently, hacking drones- small remote controlled unmanned aerial vehicles- UAVs, which can automatically detect and compromise wireless networks, by locating a weak spot in a corporate internet connection, have been used. To make matters worse, the first flaws in the advanced encryption standard used for Internet banking and financial transactions as well as Government secure transmission, have been discovered.

But most worrying, security experts from McAfee have confirmed the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving infiltration of the networks of 72 organisations around the world including- the UN, the governments of the US, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada, ASEAN, the International Olympic committee and an array of companies from defence contractors to high-tech enterprises including Google- with most of the victims unaware until recently of the breaches.

This represents a massive loss of economic advantage- possibly the biggest transfer of IP wealth in history. Currently every company in every industry of significant size, with valuable IP, contracts or trade secrets is potentially under attack and this will inevitably extend to smaller organisations such as strategic hitech start-ups in the future. At the national level it involves exposure of sensitive state secrets including policy intentions and decisions covering all levels and functions of Government- trade, defence and industry policy.

The stakes are huge; a challenge to economies and global markets from both an enterprise and State perspective. This is an intolerable situation. But because it has exploded at such speed, the response to date has largely been fragmented and ineffective.

But an even more ominous threat has now emerged- the Mafia State. Mafia states include criminal groupings such as the Russian, Bulgarian and Eurasian cartels, now using cyber technology, to achieve global reach. Their mission is not just to hack credit cards and phish identities, but to infiltrate Governments at the highest level- the networks of power including senior politicians and bureaucrats, security and police department heads and major corporate executives.

Mafia dominated States include- Russia, Bulgaria, Venezuela, Kosovo, the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Guinea.  Because of the global economic crisis they have been able to acquire valuable companies and assets at bargain prices and because of record unemployment levels have been able to hire experts in every field relevant to their operations- lawyers, accountants and now software engineers. This is about much more than pillaging credit cards and trade data or bringing down unpopular sites. It’s about creating a criminal ecosystem that challenges democracy.

On a global scale, therefore cybercrime is already morphing into full blown Cyberwar!

The world's superpowers have already begun to introduce new cyber-policies to desperately protect their intellectual property, infrastructure and financial assets, as well control the flow of information within their populations. Despite their tenuous cooperation to eliminate the threat of cyber intrusion, each is also covertly preparing for the new era of Cyber Espionage.

The US is working feverishly on Plan X devised by the Defence Advanced Research Agency - turning to the private sector, universities and even computer game companies as part of a grand effort to fast track its cyber warfare capabilities. Plan X’s goal is to dominate the new digital playing field, just as it has in the past- the traditional physical battlefield; wishful thinking at best and at worst living in a dangerous delusional bubble.

The earlier US Cyber Manifesto has also been stymied. This policy aimed at supporting open access to the Internet while at the same time pursuing a policy of aggressive physical deterrence against any foreign powers such as China and Iran or organisations like WikiLeaks, which attempt to penetrate US computer systems. But even this policy is meeting resistance from vested interests on issues of regulatory control and government surveillance of business system security.

The European Convention on Cybercrime is currently bogged down because EU governments are reluctant to share sovereign IT information with other powers, even if friendly. But this may change in the future as the pressure on the Eurozone to become a United States of Europe intensifies.

China on the other hand is going for the jugular, establishing The State Internet Information Office with the express purpose of regulating and controlling its vast internet population. It has even considered building an alternative Internet to sidestep the US controlled ICAAN if a plan for an alternative UN-ITU managed forum cannot be agreed. Other dictatorial regimes across the world, from Syria to Saudi Arabia have also introduced extreme punitive measures to monitor and control access to the Web by dissidents, particularly now with democratic unrest sweeping the world, catalysed by the Arab Spring.

But the US, with the release of Stuxnet and Flame have taken this War of the Worlds to another level. They have attacked the infrastructure of an enemy nation- the very heart and soul of its social and technological integrity. In doing so they have unleashed a hydra-headed cyber-monster which could destroy the fabric of society and humanity with it.

Cybercrime  and Cyberwars go hand in hand. One is just the flip side of the other. Breaking into confidential files – whether war plans or credit cards is espionage combined with fraud, while breaking into and disabling a nation’s industrial and infrastructure assets is an act of war.

From now on Cyberspace will be the new battleground and each group will be racing, not to cooperate, but to seize the opportunity and control the process for their own ends. For many Governments, businesses and criminal groups the glittering prize of domination will be too hard to resist.

The world had turned upside down in the blink of an eye.

All parties now understand that the nature of conflict and balance of world power is shifting with lightning speed, obsoleting overnight the nature of traditional war and economic dominance in a globalised cyber-world. Future conflicts will not be about destroying an enemy armed with billion dollar hi-tech armaments such as tanks, jets and warships, but will be primarily played out on a digital chessboard in future cyberspace.

Oversize superpower military budgets are no longer necessary or prudent when an equally lethal attack can be waged with virtual weapons at a tiny fraction of the cost. 

What value a sophisticated weapons system if it can be disabled by an elite group of cyber hackers with a Stuxnet or Flame type virus?

What value armies of highly trained soldiers if their command and control centres can be disabled with a few keyboard strokes and a swarm of smart software agents?

What value the trillions of dollars spent on containing Al-Qaeda if the economic and logistical systems supporting the attack can be thrown into disarray by a powerful artificial intelligence algorithm?

But the military establishments of the major powers are still coming to terms with the mind-blowing ramifications of Cyberwar. Not only will their weapons soon be obsolete but they will be too.

And as in the War of The Worlds, this can include control of robotic devices such as today’s drones as well as Satellite systems- not just used for surveillance, but for tracking the world’s ecosystems and helping preserve the planet. But today’s smart sensory devices are also coming in micro packages- smart satellites the size of milk cartons that can be launched by groups such as the White Hats. UAV swarms and mini drones, such as currently being manufactured by Venezuela for Iran, that can carry lethal payloads, not in the form of bombs, but chemical agents.

With the new Internet protocol Ipv6 about to be launched, with the capacity to link the Internet to any electronically embedded physical artefact, such micro devices can be controlled and disabled exactly as the Iranian centrifuges.

Any physical object or service that can be linked to sensors and a wireless antenna including- manufacturing and production machinery, vehicle and transport networks, communication hubs, security systems, medical devices, electricity grids, bridges and roads, as well as billions of consumer and industrial devices, have now been drawn into this digital vortex. 

These scenarios are rapidly becoming the stuff of nightmares - and why? Because the US Administration, the Pentagon and its acolytes, couldn’t resist displaying their Alpha prowess- taking the morally low road to retribution, when negotiations faltered; using the same flawed self-serving logic that allowed a million civilians to be incinerated at Hiroshima.

Dominance in tomorrow’s world is now about nimble minds, artificial intelligence and super smart algorithms. Any country on the planet will be able to afford to train an endless stream of talented young agile minds to code complex cyber warfare algorithms, especially when the latest efforts by the major powers, such as Stuxnet and Flame and the dozens of other worms and malware are already available as templates on the black market.

Anything that a superpower such as the US or China throws at this problem in the future will rebound on them the next day or the next hour.

And recruiting the best young hackers and software engineers and stashing them in a modern day Bletchley Park like the code breakers working on the Nazi Enigma machine, isn’t going to work either. The competitive advantage of MIT, Harvard or University of Pennsylvania trained software engineers is about to evaporate as the STEM – Science Technology Engineering and Maths faculties of these elite educational establishments begin to churn out free courseware,  enrolling hundreds of thousands of eager students free of charge online around the world.

Under the new mantra of free education, the next generation will be able to study courses in software engineering, artificial intelligence and Web science at the same rigorous level as their fee paying contemporaries from these world class institutions. With the venture capital already provided for massive online startups such as Coursera and Udacity, courses are being designed by the leading US professors and specialists in these domains, eventually creating a base pool of millions from which to draw the best coders from any country.

This is an immensely good thing, allowing poorer nations to bootstrap to the same educational and technical levels as the developed world in a very short time; providing essential skills for tomorrow’s society and increasing global productivity and innovation in a time of desperate need.  

But it’s a nightmare when it coincides with an Alpha superpower’s naked ambition to dominate tomorrow’s Cyber killing fields. 

But for the major protagonists of the neo War of the Worlds, the main goal is to control the ultimate prize of civilisation –the Internet/Web- humanity’s knowledge hub. Alarm bell are already ringing in the US Congress where desperate warnings are being issued of the chaos that will occur if control is ceded via the International Telecommunications Union-ITU, to the 160 nations of the UN that currently have no say in managing a system that increasingly controls their destiny. This is the US displaying its most arrogant behaviour – arguing in autocratic terms that it’s far better to have a wise benevolent dictator superpower than a ragbag democracy which includes India, China, Europe and Africa to oversee such an essential asset.  

So the race is on to co-opt the most advanced cyber technology to gain a global edge. Present day cybercrime technologies however will appear largely primitive within the next few years. The emphasis will shift to the application of much more sophisticated Cyberagent software technology.

The first generation of software agents appeared in the nineties and was used to trawl the Web, applying basic search procedures to locate information resources such as online shopping or travel sites and locating the best prices.

The second generation emerged around five years later. These programs were smarter, incorporating artificial intelligence that enabled them to make decisions more autonomously to meet their operational goals. They were deployed mainly in simulations of interactive population and component behaviour in a variety of environments- shopping malls, supply chains as well as disaster and conflict areas. In addition, they possessed superior negotiation and decision logic skills, using Game theory and semantic inferencing techniques.

But the third generation agents will be something else again. These will be based on complementary combinations of advanced AI techniques such as- ‘evolutionary algorithms’, that allow them to constantly improve their skills; 'neural networks' for superior pattern recognition and learning; ‘bayesian logic’ for powerful inferencing capabililty; ‘ant foraging' to help find the most efficient paths through complex network environments and ‘swarm' technology, allowing individual agent intelligence to be amplified by working cooperatively in large groups.

They will increasingly also be capable of tapping into the enormous computational intelligence of the Web, including the public databases of mathematical and scientific algorithms, eventually allowing their intelligence to be amplified by a factor of a hundredfold over previous agent capabilities.

Such agent swarms will also be equipped behaviourally and cognitively to focus on their missions with laser or Zen-like concentration, to the exclusion of everything else, until they have chased down their quarry; whether corporate strategic plans, government covert secrets or nuclear missile blueprints.

This Uber-level of intelligence will transform Agent swarms into formidable cyber strike forces, which could operate under deep cover or in sleeper mode, transforming into harmless chunks of code until a cell and attack is activated and can also replicate rapidly if additional forces are required.

Although this might sound like science fiction, the AI techniques involved, such as evolutionary algorithms, neural networks and swarm architectures have been in common use in business and industry for over ten years. The ability to harness them in cyber strike force mode is only a matter of time.

But all parties are now beginning to understand that the nature of conflict and the balance of world power is shifting with lightning speed, obsoleting overnight the nature of war and traditional economic dominance in a globalised cyber-world. As outlined, future conflicts will not be about destroying an enemy armed with billion dollar hi-tech armaments but will be played out largely in future cyberspace.

But the option of a full blown Cyberwar eventuating has just received an enormous boost from the latest risk assessment of global warming.  Now we are informed, prior to the next global warming conference in Rio +20, that the earth is very close to a tipping point, with a maximum of ten years to reset the parameters of carbon consumption and overuse of the planet’s finite natural resources. Otherwise Armageddon is irreversible. This will dominate major policy discussions in all political forums from now on.

Cyberwars are far more likely to flourish in chaotic times of critical food and water shortages, with countries desperate to secure access to critical resources. That time is not far off, with estimates of major food shortages and rising prices as early as 2013, with a follow-on spike in global conflict highly likely.  

The threat of all out Cyberwar is now an urgent issue that transcends lines between individual enterprises or governments. Unless a global cyber security framework, binding both the private and public sectors can be engineered, a world of disorder will rapidly emerge - a turbulent world, where evolutionary change in shorter and shorter timeframes will cease to be adaptive and become ultimately destructive.

The second War of The Worlds will emerge with no happy ending.