Digital Destiny and Artificial Intelligence

Nations must control their digital destiny. At a market stall in Berlin, shoppers line up to purge their mobile phones. They want indigenous Android operating systems without ties to foreign large technology companies. They want local digital services, including email, messaging, and zero-click AI search tools. The lines are growing longer. Citizens desire digital sovereignty, security, and privacy.

The “work of nations” within the convergence of the geopolitics of unfair competition, overconcentration, and monopolization, and the new social hierarchies of digital life, presents a series of challenges that will determine the rise or fall of nations.

To promote healthy competition and oversee the growth of monopolistic structures, competition policy must evolve with the realities of the infosphere revolution. Digital economies now encounter many new regulatory challenges, including managing proprietary data clusters. In Latin America and the Caribbean, there are other concerns related to data sovereignty.

From the Vera C. Rubin Observatory located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in the Coquimbo Region of northern Chile, data will be streamed to data centres in California, the UK, and the Data Facility at the IN2P3/CNRS Computing Centre in Lyon, France.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a joint enterprise of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. It is operated jointly by the NSF NOIRLab and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. This digital camera is powerful enough to finally solve the mystery of whether our solar system hosts a Planet Nine.

Data from the orbital patterns of objects in the Kuiper Belt suggest there might be a Planet Nine in our Solar System. The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending beyond Neptune and filled with icy bodies and fragments from the early solar system. It is a large, donut-shaped region, much bigger than the asteroid belt.

The telescope will use artificial neural networks to potentially identify about twenty billion galaxies and discover up to two billion new objects in the solar system. This digital camera will use AI and machine learning in its operations and data analysis. It is hoped that the use of AI by this digital camera can help solve the mystery of Planet Nine.

The issue isn’t that AI lacks knowledge. It’s that AI lacks the talent to challenge existing paradigms. AI models are trained to predict future outcomes. They excel at mimicking human reasoning but lack originality.

Current models predict what is most likely. But in major discoveries, it’s often the outliers, residuals, and errors that matter most. The Vera C. Rubin project will utilize a cloud-based system called the Rubin Science Platform.

This online platform offers tools for data access, filtering, and analysis. Its distributed data storage and access promote wider participation in science. However, it is not the first astronomical data observatory in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Don Cosmo Damien Churruca was appointed to lead an expedition to fix the longitudinal points in the New World relative to Cádiz. He established an observatory at Laventille to collect this data.

From there, he observed the immersion of Jupiter’s third moon and its satellites in the moon’s disc on January 2, 1793. On January 28, 1793, he dismantled his observatory and sailed to Grenada and onwards to Spain. In Spain, he completed his experiment by observing from Cádiz on October 23, 1793, the entrance of the star Aldebaran into the moon’s disk.

This, along with his measurements from Laventille in January, allowed him to connect the New World with the Old and determine an absolute longitude.

In Trinidad, he met Dona María Dolores Ruiz de Apodaca. Together, they narrowly escaped the arrival of Lieutenant General Sir Ralph Abercrombie of England, who captured Trinidad for the English in 1797.

Back then, there was no internet to stream the data, but today, the Web is the ship, the sea, and the sail. In 1805, while commanding the “San Juan Nepomuceno,” Don Cosmo was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar. But by then, the data from Laventille, Trinidad, was already in Cádiz, Spain.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory can see as far as 1.2 million light years. Presently, the furthest reach of most data is about 163K light years. The observatory will study changes in the sky for transient objects and dark matter.

A continuous filming of the southern night sky will stream images to large AI-driven data centres. The camera housed inside the new telescope will repeatedly capture the night sky for ten years, to produce a Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

Every forty seconds it will capture an image for about eight to twelve hours per day.  During the infosphere revolution, data remains the purest source of added value to achieve digital sovereignty as countries write their digital destiny.