AI Atlases and Digital Twins of Opioid Supply Chains

Humans and technology are no longer separate but form a new evolutionary unit, where technology is not just a tool like a plough in Mesopotamia, but an integral part of our existence and development. Homo technologicus, information organisms in the Age of AI, are fashioned by and in symbiotic relationships with AI-Assemblages. This is a new stage of human evolution. It is driven solely by the integration of technology into our biology, minds, and habitus.

This concept extends beyond the traditional homo sapiens to emphasise the human as “wo/man-the-user-of-technology” (homo technologicus), whose very existence is now intertwined with technological tools, ranging from knowledge graphs, and digital twins of synthetic opioid supply chains, to advanced neural lace. In our modern world, many governments and organisations are not prepared to meet the challenges on the horizon during the Infosphere Revolution.

This revolution is not industrial. It is about information organisms in the infosphere. In the Age of AI, startup companies are fostering linkages with Customs and Border Protection agencies to build and operate global supply chain platforms, that map how fentanyl ingredients are assembled and transported to production sites.

Customs and Border Control are now using AI to pinpoint and crack down on fentanyl trafficking. In 2021, more than 70,000 Americans died of synthetic opioid overdoses according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse. The traditional approach like a police raid on a club in Carli Bay, Couva, in 2010, to seize “guns and ganga” are now enhanced by Supply Chain Disruption techniques using AI.

With AI systems and agents, Border Control and Customs can see deeper inside fentanyl supply chains, leading to larger seizures of both finished fentanyl product and the chemicals used to manufacture the opioid. Using AI assemblages, Homeland Security Agencies have managed to build an opioid “Atlas”.

The new “Atlas” traces forced labour and modern day slave camps along the Opioid Supply Roads. The “Atlas” has now expanded its operations into counternarcotics. The “Atlas” is a knowledge-graph that traces complex relationships of edges and nodes, showing the relationships among companies and facilities in the fentanyl supply chain.

In effect, the “Atlas” is building a Digital Twin of the Global Supply Chain. The “Atlas” is now helping Customs and Border Control to track shipments of illicit precursors. Unmasking shell companies and the rhizomes of chemical suppliers is a critical part of disrupting and destroying fentanyl supply chains.

The old techniques of drug trafficking surveillance have not worked for fentanyl. The players are more organised and better educated. The precursor chemicals are not in and of themselves prohibited substances. This allows corrupt transit countries with limited resources to be become complicit in the trade.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic created an appreciation for the complexity of supply chains. The Airbus model A380 contains about four million components from 30 countries. Those parts must come together at exact times to build the plane. Supply chains are rarely one-way streets, and raw materials and finished products tend to move in both directions. These insights are at the heart of knowledge-graph building of drug trafficking rings.

Overall, AI proffers the capability to improve network orchestration with unmatched efficiency that cannot be achieved by human thinking alone. Likewise, a Digital Twin of the Global Supply Chain of synthetic opioids is helping to disrupt drug trafficking cartels.

The Caribbean has always been a front line. Within a few days of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9th November 1989, US armed forces intervened in the Caribbean. Operation “Just Cause” aimed to arrest Panama’s de facto leader, General Manuel Noriega, on charges of racketeering, money laundering, and drug trafficking. The intervention of 24,000 U.S. troops was launched on December 20, 1989. The operation involved U.S. helicopters, gunships, tanks, paratroopers, and marines.

The twinning of operation “Just Cause” and the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, creating fifteen independent countries, including Russia, boosted by Mikhail Gorbachev’s “glasnost” and “perestroika,” calls attention to the themes of continuity and change in international history, and the persistence of U.S. military intervention in the greater Caribbean, and across geographies and situations.

By 1992, few could get around Fukuyama’s theory of the end of history. He argued that the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy, which occurred when the Soviet Empire imploded, that humanity had reached the very end of history itself. That is, we had reached the end-point in mankind’s philosophical evolution, and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human governance.

America is at the forefront of advances in AI technologies, and digital twins of synthetic opioid supply chains, and AI Knowledge-Atlases are fresh gadgets that can now buttress Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection backed by its formidable military prowess.