IB Digital Society 4.6C Conflicts, War, Laws, Regulations, and Policies Key Definitions

The laws, rules, standards, and oversight that guide how AI is developed and used. Because it varies widely between countries and is often slower than the technology, governance of AI is uneven and incomplete.

A digital system that can sense its environment and act to reach a goal with little or no human control. It need not have a physical body, so it is a broader category than a robot.

The use of digital attacks on an opponent's computer systems and networks to disrupt, damage, or spy, often targeting critical infrastructure. A defining feature is the attribution problem: it is frequently hard to prove who launched an attack, which weakens deterrence and accountability.

The laws, rules, and policies societies use to govern digital technology, covering data protection, platforms, cybercrime, AI, and encryption. It faces a pacing problem, because technology advances faster than the law, and a borderless technology meets laws that stop at borders.

Scrambling data using a key so that only someone with the correct key can read it, protecting the data both while it is stored and while it is being sent.

Weapons systems that use AI to select and attack targets on their own, with little or no human involvement in the decision to kill. The central debate is whether meaningful human control must be preserved, since a machine cannot be held responsible for a wrongful killing.

False or misleading information that spreads online, whether shared by mistake or deliberately, made harder to catch when convincing media can be produced and shared by anyone.

Biased or one-sided information designed to influence public opinion.