Direction: Read the given passage carefully to answer the following questions. Each question will have five alternatives as its answer. Choose the correct option as your answer.

Recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) have captured the imagination of the public, businesses and governments alike. The Government of India has also, very recently, released a comprehensive report on the opportunities afforded by this current wave of AI. Leaders of the IT industry in India are almost certain that this wave of AI will lead to fundamental changes in the skills landscape, and implicitly, in terms of underlying threats and dangers. Concurrently, there is an exponential explosion of digital uncertainty. Few can fully comprehend the nature of the new threat, the likes of which have not been witnessed in past decades if not centuries. Few also realise the grave implications of what it means to have our lives and our economies run on what may be described as fertile digital topsoil. Even fewer realise the kind of intrinsic problems that result from this.

It is oft-repeated that digital infrastructure is built on layers upon layers of omniscient machine intelligence, human-coded software abstractions, and undependable hardware components. Each of the layers interconnects through complex and deeply embedded protocols. The narrow aperture of understanding of such aspects means that the vast majority of people are ignorant of the implications. Even less understood is that complexity of this kind begets vulnerabilities. While cyber has, no doubt, attracted a measure of attention, there is little — or true — understanding of the nature of today’s cognitive warfare. Cognitive warfare truly ranks alongside other elements of modern warfare such as the domains of maritime, air and space. Cognitive warfare puts a premium on sophisticated techniques that are aimed at destabilising institutions, especially governments, and manipulation, among other aspects, of the news media by powerful non-state actors. It entails the art of using technological tools to alter the cognition of human targets, who are often unaware of such attempts. The end result could be a loss of trust apart from breaches of confidentiality and loss of governance capabilities. Even more dangerous is that it could alter a population’s behaviour using sophisticated psychological techniques of __________. 

Given the maze of emerging technologies, both businesses and governments today confront an Armageddon of sorts. The methods employed are highly insidious. For example, today, with almost a third of companies in the more advanced countries of the world investing more in intangible assets than physical ones, they are putting themselves directly at risk from AI. Another estimate is that with over 50% of the market value of the top 500 companies sitting in intangibles, they too are deeply vulnerable. As firms, large and small, spend billions of dollars to migrate to the Cloud, and more and more sensors constantly send out sensitive information, the risks go up in geometrical progression. All this portends a dark, rather than a brave, new world order that we hope to inhabit. Hence, digital uncertainty is morphing into radical uncertainty rather rapidly. Today, government and government agencies are spending significant resources to undo the impact of misinformation and disinformation, but this may not be enough. There is not enough understanding of how the very nature of information is being manipulated and the extent to which AI drives many of these drastic transformations. All this contributes to what can only be referred to as ‘truth decay’.