Pakistani cyber attackers using country domain code to target Indian defense personnel

AIHIK SUR

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The Indian government has released a cybersecurity advisory cautioning that Indian defence personnel are being targeted by Pakistani cyber attackers. These attackers are reaching out to their targets using websites registered under the domain - .IN.

Cyber threat actors are constantly devising new methods to target potential victims, and this is one of their most recent tactics.

Moreover, this particular tactic is significant as the .IN domain is India's top country code internet domain, hence making it harder for people to discern where the website is being operated and by whom.

According to the advisory accessed by Moneycontrol, these websites are being hosted by Pakistan-based malicious actors, and are being used "to trap Indian defence personnel".

This comes at a time when various branches of the Indian defense, including the Indian Navy, have been targeted by threat actors.

Fixing Global Governance

GORDON BROWN

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EDINBURGH – After India’s G20 summit and the UN General Assembly this month, world leaders will attend the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Marrakesh, before heading to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai. But there is little optimism that these summits will deliver meaningful progress in tackling our greatest challenges, not because of any lack of resolve, but because the global rulebook we have been following since the end of World War II is no longer fit for purpose.

The world’s growing fragmentation was confirmed at the G20 summit. Though the meeting signaled India’s arrival as a major power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s moment of triumph was fleeting. The summit did little to prevent the 2020s from almost certainly becoming a low-growth decade.

U.S. Shared Intelligence With Canada After Alleged Assassination of Sikh Separatist

Dustin Volz

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WASHINGTON—Canadian intelligence agencies intercepted communications among Indian diplomats indicating that New Delhi was involved in the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in British Columbia earlier this year, a Western official familiar with the matter said.

Those intercepts, combined with a stream of intelligence shared by the U.S., led Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to publicly accuse India of playing a role in the shooting of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down in the parking lot of a Sikh temple.

U.S. officials are reluctant to talk about the alleged assassination plot at the same time the Biden administration is eager to forge closer ties with India to counter China, though President Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said last week the accusation was a “matter of concern.” U.S. spy agencies recently provided briefings to the congressional intelligence committees about the assassination plot, according to congressional aides.

While Canada generated the most in-depth intelligence about the assassination plot on its own, U.S. spy agencies shared intelligence that helped firm up and contextualize Ottawa’s conclusion that India was responsible, according to the Western official.

The specific U.S.-produced intelligence was given to Ottawa after the alleged assassination occurred, the official said, and while considered helpful it was Canada’s interception of electronic communications among Indian diplomats that chiefly drove its conclusion and public accusation.

Another Round of 'Physical Isolation'? Beware, Military Cadres

ANUSHKA SAXENA AND AMIT KUMAR

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Worldview Weekly #1: China’s Views on India-Canada Spat

The diplomatic spat between India and Canada has escalated quickly in a week’s time ever since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Government of India of being involved in the extra-judicial killing of the Sikh separatist leader Nijjar in Canada.

Canada followed up the accusation with the expulsion of an Indian diplomat and RAW officer to which New Delhi responded by sending back the Canadian Deputy High Commissioner in India. India rubbished Trudeau’s claims and demanded that Canada share evidence. India has since also suspended visa facilities and attached to the state properties of several Sikh separatists in India.

The issue also caught headlines in Chinese media, which saw it as an opportunity to highlight the faultlines underlying alliances centered around the US and its double standards with respect to treating India, although not in the manner the Indians have argued.

On the question of the US’s lukewarm or rather lackadaisical response to Canadian accusations of India’s involvement in the killing of a Canadian citizen (recall the Kashoggi incident), Li Haidong, a professor at the Chinese Foreign Affairs University, agreed with the general consensus that “India occupies an absolutely leading position in the overall Asia-Pacific strategy of the US” and that “this move shows the US’s desire to woo India to serve its geopolitical interests in the Asia-Pacific region.”

China Can’t Catch a Break in Asian Public Opinion

Zuri Linetsky

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China has a soft-power problem—especially among its neighbours in Asia. New data collected by my organization, the Eurasia Group Foundation, demonstrates that many people in Singapore, the Philippines, and South Korea have unfavourable views of China’s soft power. While about three-quarters of people surveyed reported favourable views of U.S. soft power (a composite measure of views of the United States, its culture, its system of government, and its influence over the past five years), just over one-third said they had similarly favourable views of Chinese soft power. This is a concrete problem for Beijing because, in the Philippines and South Korea, it contributes to policy changes that conflict with China’s objectives.

China and Russia: The New Axis of Evil

Con Coughlin

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• Xi has been eyeing the South and East China Seas, coopting the Solomon Islands, building and militarizing his own artificial islands, and threatening not only Taiwan, but neighbours such as Australia, India and Japan.
• Putin seized and occupied territory in Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014 (Crimea) and 2023, not to mention his relentless bellicosity towards the Baltic states and eastern Europe.
• There are mounting concerns... in Western security circles that in return for providing any uplift in military support for Russia, Kim wants Moscow to provide technical assistance for his missile and satellite programmes, which would seriously enhance North Korea's ability to threaten the West with its nuclear arsenal.
• Any attempt by Russia to help improve North Korea's military strength will also benefit China's Communist rulers: it will provide North Korea with the ability to intensify the threat that all three countries pose to the US and its allies -- and to global security.

It is more than twenty years since then US President George W. Bush first identified an "axis of evil" of rogue states that threatened global security, and now a new alliance of malign states is taking shape with Russia and China acting as its new lynchpins.

Back in 2002, when Bush first articulated his notion of rogue nations in his State of the Union address made in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as states that, together with their terrorist allies, "constitute an axis of evil...by seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger."

Is Chinese Youth Unemployment As Bad As It Looks?

NANCY QIAN

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China’s exceptional growth in recent decades has influenced the education and career choices of young people and their families. But now that high-skilled jobs are drying up and recent graduates are struggling to find work, there is a growing mismatch between expectations and new realities.

CHICAGO – China’s youth unemployment rate, after rising every month this year, reached a record high of 21.3% in June. Faced with hypercompetitive work environments and grim job prospects, many of the country’s young workers and middle-class professionals have embraced the “lying flat” movement – which means opting out of the culture of overwork and consumerism – while others have quit to become “full-time children.” In the wake of these startling trends, the Chinese government has stopped publishing monthly youth-unemployment data, triggering a stream of negative headlines about China’s economic “collapse.”

The Electric Vehicle Revolution Comes for German Industry

DALIA MARIN

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While German carmakers pined for the golden era of the internal combustion engine, Chinese firms gained an almost insurmountable lead in electric vehicles. By forming joint ventures with Chinese EV and battery manufacturers, German companies could acquire the necessary know-how to remain globally competitive.

MUNICH – At September’s IAA auto show in Munich, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz appealed to domestic car manufacturers, urging them to welcome competition from Asia rather than trying to curb the influx of Chinese-made electric vehicles. No other country, he insisted, could match Germany’s automotive engineering expertise. But while Scholz’s assertion was certainly true in the golden era of the internal combustion engine, Germany lacks the expertise required to compete directly with Chinese manufacturers on EVs.

Hostility Between the United States and China Looks Increasingly Inescapable

Paul Heer

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Washington and Beijing have been taking steps to resume normal diplomatic engagement, which had been largely suspended for several months after the “spy balloon” incident in February. A potential meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in San Francisco in November is widely viewed as the next opportunity to restore some positive momentum to the relationship. To that end, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently met with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi, and Secretary of State Blinken met with Chinese vice president Han Zheng on the margins of the UN General Assembly.

However, frankly, it is getting increasingly difficult to anticipate any scenario for substantial rapprochement between the United States and China in the near term, if not the foreseeable future. This is because of the structural and historical forces driving their strategic rivalry, the adversarial dynamic of their interactions, and the domestic politics on both sides that thwart mutual understanding and accommodation. These drivers keep pushing both sides—despite their rhetoric about getting bilateral relations back on track—to exchange harsh rhetoric and pursue antagonistic and retributive policies toward each other, fueling competitive tensions and hindering progress toward détente.

The historical context is fundamental. The United States spent most of the past seventy-five years as the preeminent power in the world and got used to taking that position for granted and taking advantage of it. But the end of the Cold War, coinciding as it did with China’s economic rise,

Belt and Road at 10: A Paradigm Shift in Development Finance?

Zachary Fillingham

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Ever since its largely unremarkable inception in a speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University in 2013, President Xi’s landmark Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has represented a moving target for analysts and policymakers. The branding has evolved – from a Maritime Silk Road of the 21st century, to One Belt One Road, before finally settling on the current form. So too has the project’s geographic scope, which branched out from its original Eurasian focus to eventually encompass Africa, Oceania, Latin America, and even the Arctic. And in a shift beyond the original economic thrust of promoting infrastructure development, Belt and Road has evolved into a banner under which numerous educational, environmental, and technological exchanges proliferate around the world. Just two of many examples include the ‘Digital Silk Road,’ which seeks to expand the footprint of China’s tech giants and afford them a larger role in shaping global standards, and the ‘Space Silk Road’ which facilitates satellite launches and technical cooperation among developing countries.

It’s not only the Belt and Road Initiative that has been changing over the past decade. Shifts in the global distribution of economic and diplomatic power have also unfolded, leading to a gradual eclipse of US preeminence that has favored the expansion of the BRI, a platform that is generally presented as an alternative to traditional Western circuits of development finance. A similarly upward trajectory can be discerned in two other young institutions synonymous with China’s expanding global clout – the BRICS grouping and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) – both of which have expanded their membership and diplomatic influence in recent years.

China’s Economic Slowdown Was Inevitable

Yasheng Huang

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As China’s economy steadily grew in recent decades, its advocates championed the country as an antithesis—and an antidote—to liberal economics and politics. This argument seemed credible as China grew rapidly under an autocratic and economically statist system. At the same time, the United States—that beacon of Western democracy—was suffering from economic and political sclerosis.

This contrast between the Chinese and U.S. systems, and their disparate performances, led to questions regarding the effectiveness of the Western model of free markets and liberal democracy. Perhaps, as some observers have argued—including, most recently, the economist Keyu Jin—the Chinese economic miracle could be evidence of an alternative playbook to that which enabled the West’s success. China has risen, in this view, thanks to the power of statism and the wisdom of Confucianism craftily combined with the efficiency of the private sector. As China’s growth rate consistently averaged nine percent a year, the basic ingredients in standard economics came into doubt. Perhaps market finance, the rule of law, and property rights were unnecessary and, from the perspective of Chinese culture, undesirable and counterproductive contrivances.

Blasting Bullhorns and Water Cannons, Chinese Ships Wall Off the Sea

Hannah Beech

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The Chinese military base on Mischief Reef, off the Philippine island of Palawan, loomed in front of our boat, obvious even in the predawn dark.

Radar domes, used for military surveillance, floated like nimbus clouds. Lights pointed to a runway made for fighter jets, backed by warehouses perfect for surface-to-air missiles. More than 900 miles from the Chinese mainland, in an area of the South China Sea that an international tribunal has unequivocally determined does not belong to China, cellphones pinged with a message: “Welcome to China.”

The world’s most brazen maritime militarization is gaining muscle in waters through which one-third of global ocean trade passes. Here, on underwater reefs that are known as the Dangerous Ground, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., has fortified an archipelago of forward operating bases that have branded these waters as China’s despite having no international legal grounding. China’s coast guard, navy and a fleet of fishing trawlers harnessed into a militia are confronting other vessels, civilian and military alike.

Chinese Facilities on Mischief Reef

The real reasons for the west’s protectionism

GIDEON RACHMAN

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“Trade freely with China and time is on our side.” That was the confident view of George W Bush, the former US president, in the run-up to China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. A generation later, many in the west have come to the conclusion that time was, in fact, on China’s side.

Bush was making a political judgment. He believed that a China that integrated deeply with the global economy would become more open and more democratic. But under Xi Jinping China has become more closed and authoritarian. It is also more overtly hostile to the US. Meanwhile, China’s rapid economic growth has funded a massive military build-up. 

Some US policymakers now look back to the decision to admit China to the WTO as a mistake. They believe that the huge boost this gave to Chinese exports also contributed significantly to the deindustrialisation of America. Rising inequality in the US then helped to fuel the rise of Donald Trump. 

That raises an awkward question. What if globalisation, far from promoting democracy in China, undermined democracy in the US? It would be an amusing historical irony — if we were not living with the consequences. 

Fears about the health of US democracy underpin the embrace of industrial policy by the Biden White House. Biden has retained the tariffs on China imposed by Trump and added lavish subsidies designed to reindustrialise America and give the US the lead in the technologies of the future. The White House sees these policies as crucial to the stabilisation of American society and its democratic system. 

Why Interest Rate Hikes Don’t Necessarily Tame Inflation

Adam Tooze

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For a second week, the Ones and Tooze podcast answers listener questions, this time on the subject of inflation and central banking. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts.

France’s Water War Has No End in Sight

Michele Barbero

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As France grapples with soaring temperatures and ever more ruinous droughts, a full-blown water war is unfolding in the country, with heavy clashes, injuries, and arrests.

Tensions are running high over the use of giant artificial reservoirs for irrigation, which some farmers rely on to cope with water scarcity but which critics say are making the problem worse, accelerating the depletion of limited groundwater resources for the benefit of only a handful of big producers.

The Tragedy of Volodymyr Zelensky

Michael C. Desch

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In December 2022, Time magazine named the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. The reasons seemed obvious: When Russia invaded in February of that year, few thought that Ukraine would survive more than a week, or that its president would remain at his post in Kyiv. But Zelensky, who had been a comedian and actor before his unlikely landslide election victory in 2019, defied Russian airstrikes and mobilized his countrymen, rebuffing Western offers of evacuation: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” His unexpected courage helped to rally Ukrainian forces against Russia’s northern thrust. He also reminded many of the two-time Man of the Year—in 1940 and 1949—Winston Churchill. Also known for defending his country against the aggression of an authoritarian leader, Churchill was, as Time’s tribute noted, “the historical figure to whom [Zelensky] has most often been compared in recent months.”

Comparisons between Zelensky and Churchill are apt, but not only for the reasons that those making them intend. The British Bulldog’s legacy is in fact quite mixed. His biographer Geoffrey Wheatcroft rightly reminds us that a balanced assessment of Churchill must acknowledge “the one irredeemably sublime moment in his life, when he saved his country and saved freedom.” But his actions in Britain’s “finest hour” do not negate the many missteps he made over the course of his political career. As more critical accounts of Churchill’s tenure have emerged—among the best are Robert Rhodes James’s Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 and John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory—it has become harder to ignore his many blunders.

Washington’s Bet on AI Warfare

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Throughout human history, technological progress has translated into military prowess. In most instances, the states that incorporate new technologies more quickly and effectively into their respective militaries have gained a significant advantage over their adversaries. The same is likely to be true for artificial intelligence (AI), with the United States and China currently locked in a competition for global AI superiority. This competition for AI and technological supremacy could very well dictate the future global landscape.

Although China might disagree with the existence of such a technological competition, the United States firmly believes in it. This was evident in a speech by U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks on August 28, 2023. Deputy Secretary Hicks’ speech was significant for several reasons, primarily because it gave valuable insight into the U.S. military’s strategic thinking about China, AI and autonomous systems, and technological innovation.

At the core of Deputy Secretary Hicks’ speech was that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) aimed to have a “data-driven and AI-empowered military.” Although AI has gained mainstream popularity within the past few years, great powers have been looking into the military applications of AI for decades now. From 2014 onwards, when the United States announced its Third Offset Strategy, it has been building the foundation for incorporating AI into its military.

Yom Kippur War: Henry Kissinger talks US role in Israel's darkest hour

AVINOAM BAR-YOSEF

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“At six thirty in the morning, Joseph Sisco, then-assistant secretary for the Middle East, asked to see me urgently. ‘There is a crisis in the Middle East,’ he said. ‘And if you act immediately you can still stop it.’” Dr. Henry Kissinger, the legendary US secretary of state and national security advisor, was remembering the morning of Yom Kippur, 1973.

He was in New York with the entire State Department senior team on the occasion of the United Nations annual conference. It was both Yom Kippur and Shabbat. Dawn was beginning to break. The most Jewish city outside of Israel was not yet awake.

He recalls: “The reports were vague. It was said that the Israelis must have attacked because nobody believed that the Egyptians were capable of launching an attack across the Suez Canal. I said: ‘The one thing that is not happening is that the Israelis would attack on Yom Kippur. That is practically – almost – impossible. But by the middle of the day, it became apparent that this was a regular war, that it was a full-scale attack. Our team believed that the Israelis would smash them in a few hours. The first thing I did was turn to the Israeli ambassador Simcha Dinitz. He was not in Washington. He was in Jerusalem.”

Assessing the negative consequences of globalization

IGOR KUCHMA

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Globalization may have brought common economic prosperity and improved welfare worldwide at first; now, however, it has more cons than pros.

This is mainly due to the so-called chain effect.

Because of the interconnectedness of economies, a problem in one country can have wide ramifications and lead to recessions and other adverse effects on a global scale.

The bursting of the dotcom bubble in the late 1990s, the real-estate bubble in 2008, and the European debt crisis in 2009 are excellent examples of this phenomenon.

The challenge is that, in the context of full globalization, it is difficult to mitigate the negative consequences of interconnected economies.

The unfolding crisis in China serves as a poignant reminder of this reality.

First, a lower-than-expected flow of orders from Chinese consumers or a cutback in foreign investment by the government cannot be easily replaced.

Finland Raced to Join NATO. What Happens Next Is Complicated.

Steven Erlanger

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Barely a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finland cast aside decades of military nonalignment and self-reliance and joined the NATO alliance.

That happened with breathtaking speed, as these matters go, but gaining membership may have been the easy part. Now comes the complicated process of integrating itself into the alliance and its requirement of collective defense — with all of its financial, legal and strategic hurdles.

“Joining NATO is an expensive business, and supporting Ukraine is an expensive business, and there’s no end to that in sight,” said Janne Kuusela, director-general for defense policy at Finland’s Ministry of Defense.

Membership in NATO has long been considered a cheap benefit, given the American nuclear umbrella and the principle of collective defense. But NATO also has extensive requirements of its members — not just spending goals for the military, but specific demands from each country for certain capabilities, armaments, troop strengths and infrastructure as defined by the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

Achieving that will demand some difficult and costly decisions from the government and military officials as they learn to think strategically outside Finland’s borders and adapt its forces and their capabilities to the alliance’s needs.

They will have to decide how to move troops and equipment to Norway, Sweden or the Baltic States in the event they need reinforcements, for instance, or whether to participate in other NATO tasks like patrols in Kosovo or the Mediterranean.

Poland’s spat with Ukraine angered many in Europe, and was a gift for Putin

Luke McGee

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Europe’s support for Ukraine faced an unexpected curveball this week as Poland – hitherto Kyiv’s staunchest ally on the continent – seemed to declare it would stop sending arms to its neighbor.

The move came after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized Warsaw for continuing to ban Ukrainian grain imports, and is the latest example of more confrontational behavior from Poland’s government toward Kyiv, just ahead of a tight general election in the country.

The political theater has raised a number of important questions, most important among them, will this be the moment that Europe’s steadfast resolve against Russia’s full-scale invasion finally cracks?

So how did a dispute over grain imports escalate into a diplomatic crisis? The European Union placed a temporary ban on grain imports from Ukraine in May, to avoid a bottleneck of cheap grain that risked undercutting farmers in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. The EU suspended the ban last week, angering those countries, who vowed to keep restrictions in place, and in turn sparking protests from Poland.

Poland is weeks away from a national election on October 15 in which the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) is expected to suffer losses. Anyone who follows European politics will tell you that agriculture is incredibly important. Farmers are motivated political agents and citizens tend to care about food security, sometimes disproportionately and irrationally. And the PiS will need rural votes to remain in power.

‘This is not just Putin’s war’: How Finland’s top diplomat sees Ukraine

Ishaan Tharoor

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When Russia launched its full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Finland had a center-left ruling government in power in Helsinki. It was also, as it had been for generations, outside the umbrella of the NATO alliance.

A bit more than a year later, Finland formally joined the military bloc, spurred into the alliance by the reality of Russian aggression and President Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist revanchism. Overnight, NATO’s border with Russia doubled in length.

In June, Finland inaugurated a new center-right government. Though its domestic agendas are different from its predecessor, with a far-right faction in the ruling coalition, its approach to supporting Ukraine and the broader Western effort to resist Russia’s invasion has endured. On the sidelines of U.N. meetings in New York last week, I spoke with Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen on life in NATO and the prospects of the war. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Today’s WorldView: How does it feel to be a full-fledged NATO member after all these years?

Valtonen: It feels good. Personally, I’ve been advocating Finnish membership in NATO for as long as I can remember. Now, there’s a very strong majority of Finns who are in favor of us being in NATO and, if it wasn’t so, Finland never would have joined. There are these Russian narratives around that NATO is a threat or NATO enlargement is a threat, but it’s important to realize that NATO in and of itself doesn’t enlarge. It’s the free people in democratic societies who vote or choose to join, and that was the case for Finland and Sweden, as well, once they are let in. We were pretty close to NATO anyway so in a way it was just a natural step. Our military was almost 100 percent interoperable with NATO as it was.

How the Pentagon assesses Ukraine’s progress

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After three months of achingly slow progress, Ukraine’s counter-offensive is gaining some momentum. Near the southern village of Robotyne, Ukrainian troops have pierced the first of Russia’s three defensive lines. They are now attacking the second. “Had we had this conversation two weeks ago, I would have been slightly more pessimistic,” says Trent Maul, the director of analysis for America’s Defence Intelligence Agency (dia). “Their breakthrough on that second defensive belt…is actually pretty considerable.” Can Ukraine breach it, and the third line beyond, before shells become scarce and winter beckons?

U.S. Economy Could Withstand One Shock, but Four at Once?

David Harrison

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The U.S. economy has sailed through some rough currents this year but now faces a convergence of hazards that threaten to create more turbulence.

Among the possible challenges this fall: a broader auto workers strike, a lengthy government shutdown, the resumption of student loan payments and rising oil prices.

Each on its own wouldn’t do too much harm. Together, they could be more damaging, particularly when the economy is already cooling due to high interest rates.

“It’s that quadruple threat of all elements that could disrupt economic activity,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.

Many analysts expect slower economic growth this fall but not a recession. Daco forecasts economic growth to slow sharply to a 0.6% annual rate in the fourth quarter from an expected 3.5% gain during the current quarter. Economists at Goldman Sachs expect growth to cool to a 1.3% rate next quarter, from a 3.1% gain in the third.

So far in 2023, robust consumer spending and historically low unemployment have supported solid U.S. economic activity, despite the Federal Reserve lifting interest rates to the highest level in 22 years to fight inflation by slowing growth. Growth in Europe and China, meanwhile, has slowed sharply.

One economic threat is a wider and more prolonged strike by the United Auto Workers against three Detroit automakers. Nearly 13,000 workers began striking three plants on Sept. 15. And UAW President Shawn Fain said Friday the strikes would expand to 38

Why open source is the cradle of artificial intelligence

Steven Vaughan-Nichols

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In a way, open source and artificial intelligence were born together.

Back in 1971, if you'd mentioned AI to most people, they might have thought of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. However, AI was already a real subject that year at MIT, where Richard M. Stallman (RMS) joined MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Years later, as proprietary software sprang up, RMS developed the radical idea of Free Software. Decades later, this concept, transformed into open source, would become the birthplace of modern AI.

It wasn't a science-fiction writer but a computer scientist, Alan Turing, who started the modern AI movement. Turing's 1950 paper Computing Machine and Intelligence originated the Turing Test. The test, in brief, states that if a machine can fool you into thinking that you're talking with a human being, it's intelligent.

According to some people, today's AIs can already do this. I don't agree, but we're clearly on our way.

In 1960, computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" and, along the way, created the Lisp language. McCarthy's achievement, as computer scientist Paul Graham put it, "did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple operators and a notation for functions, you can build a whole programming language."