72 l THE CONVERGING TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION AND HUMAN CAPITAL
and contacts on mobile phones. For example, recently India powerfully upgraded its technological surveillance capacities to deploy individual facial recognition at railway stations and airports, algorithmic crowd analysis during street protests, and mobile, contactless biometrics identification for temperature detection (BiometricUpdate.com 2020). Beyond state surveillance is a whole range of risks related to manipulation of information and behavior modification for commercial surveillance purposes. The risks posed by converging technologies as applied to human capital are presented in table 5.1, grouped by existing sources of risk and those likely to emerge in the next few years. Vulnerable populations, in particular, are exposed to risks of cybercrime, TABLE 5.1 Risks Posed by Converging Technologies Timeline
Risk stratification
Current
Data commodification • Commodification of behavioral, emotional, and biometric data of children and other vulnerable populations for education scoring, future commercial targeting, and exclusion/discrimination schemes Failure of technological design and predictive value • Biases in datasets and algorithmic design, as well as poor performance in predictive value, may lead to system (access, delivery, optimization) failures, with corrosive implications for underserved groups Manipulation for state surveillance • Commodification of behavioral, transactional, socioeconomic, and consumption data for social credit systems and exclusion/discrimination schemes • Use of personal data to silence civil society resistance, repress traditional media structures, and harm the reputation of knowledge institutions, leading to the closure of virtual civic spaces, affecting people’s resilience and society’s social fabric Information disorders, disinformation, and hate speech • Use of personal, demographic, ethnic, behavioral, and emotional data collected on children and adults for targeting disinformation and polarization, for emotional manipulation and hate speech, and for radicalization • Mobilization of large population subgroups around violent narratives, including around elections
Near term to five-year time frame
Cyberoperations, cyberbullying, and social engineering • Use of personal and emotional data for social engineering, leading to more efficient and more powerful acts of cybercrime • Use of biometric data for precision biometric attacks (cyberattacks where autonomous malware uses soft facial, voice, or biometric features for impersonation) • Exfiltration of sensitive datasets about populations to direct attacks to vulnerable subgroups (such as targeting groups facing food insecurity and retaliating against specific minorities, based on biometric data) • Automated data poisoning—that is, poisoning data in critical information infrastructure such as that related to medical or hospital databases or biometric, civic, and electoral registries • Cyberattacks targeting automated supply chains, thereby affecting food security and the delivery of essential human capital services • Cyberattacks in which autonomous malware weaponizes other dual-use technologies (such as biotech, 3-D printing, and robotics, including drone technologies)
Source: Adapted from Pauwels 2020.
