GeoLegal Weekly #60 - Deepfake Geography and Space Politics
I explore potential unruliness in outer space and connect it to risks on earth.
I’ve spent much of this week at the Space Beach Law Lab, a deep dive into the rules of the cosmos hosted by Justin Hectus and Drea Bernardi. This week I’m going to highlight three takeaways from the conference that I think have more general application.
1. Deepfake Geography and Deepfake Space
In deep-diving about space, I came across the concept of deepfake geography. I’ve written a decent amount about deepfakes - both how they twist our sense of truth and how I was fooled into forwarding misinformation, as well as how employees are being fooled into malicious transactions (in UNRULY). But the concept of deepfake geography is novel.
There’s a growing concern of AI generated satellite images that purport to show the way things are on Earth but really are designed for manipulative purposes. Imagine the justification of a country bombing another by showing that troop columns were visible from the skies. Or a companying trying to stop a plummeting stock price due to an environmental disaster by releasing satellite images that make it look less widespread. While the risk of being tricked is real, the bigger risk is the so-called “liar’s dividend” of liars discrediting true images by claiming they are deepfakes engineered for propaganda purposes. This could render images of earth from space dubious or inadmissible.
Of course, this can also be extended into deepfake space incidents. A couple years ago a fake video of an Indian satellite crashing into the ISS was dropped on the internet. One can imagine in a more hostile environment that government leaders, reacting to a perceived crisis, take earthly actions because of more realistic and less disprovable types of fakes.
For me, this drives home the fact that as citizens we are constantly bombarded with data we are not in a position to de-risk. Sure, I can try to count the number of fingers on an AI-generated image but can I really figure out if a satellite image is truthful? No, I can’t. As complexity builds on complexity (for instance, more and more satellite images are produced by more and more private companies) this becomes even more challenging, eventually shifting us into a position of questioning everything. When we think about traditional trust-building in business, this type of always-skeptical posturing is alarming.
2. Space Beach
As part of the conference, I spent an hour aboard the historic Queen Mary speaking to Long Beach’s mayor Rex Richardson. Long Beach has been at the forefront of America’s space industry and is currently preparing to be a major player in the upcoming Los Angeles Olympics. At the same time, policy shocks emanating from the Federal government risk threatening universities and health research, as well as ongoing initiatives related building the greenest port in America. Talking to Mayor Richardson underscored to me that while there are huge opportunities in the new economy (like the business of space), there is a very real push and pull with limited budgets that are coming under strain from the exodus of federal spending.
While Long Beach seems be navigating this deftly, the risk that the new economy gets crowded out by the need to plug an exodus of federal funding feels very real and also very hard to forecast. After all, for all the opportunities the new economy presents, emerging technologies threaten to re-order the existing economy at a time when traditional sources of funding for that economy are unstable.
3. UNRULY Space
Finally, I had the opportunity to connect my new book UNRULY to the galaxy by answering the question “Is the World Safe for Space?” The thrust of my presentation was that space is both the supreme global commons and theater for competition because there is so much opportunity to assert power and ownership for both countries and companies. As start-ups pour into the space industry, I wonder how many are doing long-term planning about where politics on earth is going. After all, if you’re going to build a business model with ROI in 10 to 20 years, you need some pretty serious assumptions about who is at war with whom and what geopolitics looks like.
For this presentation, I developed four scenarios, and I bet you can guess which is the most likely from my POV. First, there’s a scenario where global rules are restored and cooperation amongst great powers leads to the exploitation of space for all mankind. The second is a redux of the Cold War where there are global institutions but they mainly serve to reinforce the fact that major powers are on different paths - and the risk they cross over in space is as seismic as the nuclear politics of decades past. Third, I outline a world of fragmented rules from the erosion we are currently seeing of international law yet contemplate a thaw in great power politics. This “shrinking prize” scenario ends up one of peaceful but only partial exploitation of space.
Finally, the most likely scenario I highlight is of Unruly Space, which is competition amongst global powers in a world of fragmented rules. This is a world of space wars and split scientific endeavors. It’s one that seems attractive to the private sector, where returns are real until enemy countries attempt to sabotage and gain leverage.
You may not care about space. But the broader point is that the direction of great power conflict and the rules guiding international relations will impact any sector with long product delivery cycles. That can be oil pipelines, telecommunications innovation or aerospace. Very few companies employ futurists; the present is so unstable, many more will soon find out they need to.
-SW