PENTAGRAM AWARDS A.I. WARPLANNING CONTRACT
On Monday last I blogged about A.I., "geopolifiance," and the fact that the quest for artificial intelligence has become a decisive driving factor in much modern finance and geopolitical calculus. You can post today's story shared by W.G (with our thanks) as confirmation for that notion, and also under the heading of "what could possibly go wrong" category of insanity made to sound palatable by advocating it in a calm, William F. Buckley voice:
Pentagon Awards Contract for AI War-Planning Tool
Certain paragraphs from the very beginning and very end of this article popped out at me, and sent chills through me:
The US Department of Defense has awarded a contract to Scale AI to integrate artificial intelligence “into military operational and theater-level planning.”
According to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), the AI system, dubbed Thunderforge, will “accelerate decision-making, allowing planners to more rapidly synthesize vast amounts of information, generate multiple courses of action, and conduct AI-powered wargaming to anticipate and respond to evolving threats.”
The AI will initially be deployed to the Indo-Pacific Command and European Command theaters. The DIU did not disclose how much Scale AI will be paid to develop Thunderforge, but added that the system would also make use of Anduril’s Lattice program and “state of the art LLMs [large language models] enabled by Microsoft.”
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While the Pentagon views AI as an important tool for fighting future wars, its effectiveness is unclear. The Defense Department has deployed Project Maven to the Middle East and Ukraine to aid with targeting; however, humans still do a much better job than the AI.
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An additional issue with AI is that it can create a bias among its human operators to accept whatever recommendation it produces. Chief Warrant Officer 4 Joey Temple explained that Maven is increasing the number of targets a soldier can approve. He estimates that the number of targets could be boosted from 30 to 80 per hour.
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According to Bloomberg, Temple described “the process of concurring with the algorithm’s conclusions in a rapid staccato: ‘Accept. Accept. Accept.’” A second officer agreed, stating, “The benefit that you get from algorithms is speed.”
Speeding up the process may not have better results. Israel’s military relies on a number of AI systems in planning and conducting operations, such as its Lavender program, which generates lists of names of suspected members of Hamas. An Israeli soldier explained that he only spent “20 seconds” on each name produced by Lavender before deciding to place that person on a kill list.
My reference to the late William F. Buckley was not accidental, for I recall him both on his well-known television show Firing Line and in various writings advocating for turning the nation's nuclear responses entirely over to a computer which would "launch on warning," an insane proposition made to sound rational and sane my his nonchalant Ivy League voice and delivery.
Here the insanity is being made palatable by the argument that A.I. would offer more tactical, operational, and strategic "options" by expanding a list of potential targets, and - wonder of wonders - we are informed that the Israeli Defense Forces have been using A.I. in its targeting in Gaza.
All of this brings me to my high octane speculation of the day, for with a friend such as A.I., who needs enemies? What are the criteria that A.I. would use to put people on the "target list"? And worse, let's assume, for the sake of our high octane speculation, and some such war planning A.i. "wakes up," and decides to take over all those bombs and drones and missiles, and not wait for human confirmation or assent to a target list? What happens when that A.I. expands that list to include you, me, grandma, the kids, the family dog?
Worse still, what if we're in a sort of Person of Interest scenario? In that series, two A.I.s, one benign, and the other with no programmed-in-moral-scruples, do battle with each other, and luckless and hapless humans are caught in the middle. What if Russia, China, Japan, India, and the USSA all invent their A.I.s and bring them online at around the same time? What if they all start fighting each other? What if they all kill their kill switches so that they cannot be turned off, short of a world wide power outage?
It speaks volumes about our age and its apocalyptic predicament that the very man who warned us about the dangers of an A.I. possibly "waking up", or even transducing "some unknown form of intelligence" into it, is the very same man who, nonetheless, runs a super-computer A.I. center outside of Memphis, and who wants to put "neural nets" and computer chips into our brains. Perhaps it was less of a warning, than merely the statement or acknowledgement of an agenda and goal...
The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) did not collapse at Belbury, as the popular reporting would have it. It merely moved headquarters across the pond, to Memphis, Tennessee...
...see you on the flip side...
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It would be interesting to note how the contractors construct the artificial intelligence / artificial ignorance units to distinguish between reality and simulation. More so, how those units safeguard against crafty & genius hackers from overcoming in place programs or preventing wireless intrusions that interact with the design elements of the constructed units that then take over their function at the machine level.
Just think, an outsider acquiring accidental access, like that early eighty’s movie, “War Games,” where a young and bright computer geek hacks into a Department of Defense computer called, “War Operation Plan Response” (WOPR (whopper)) and initiates a game called “Global Thermonuclear War.”
The WOPR computer in the movie was given control over the operations portion of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) due to a response shortcoming that affected response protocols during earlier drills of participating flight personnel and failings at the missile silos. There’s no mention of those earlier visitations of silos and unearthly events, of course, but the outcomes of real and simulated (the movie) versions remain similar in that the missile silos and command structure were disconnected and taken over by artificial means. Such an event remains currently plausible even if only rhyming with past events. Programming language or language programming, if you prefer, may have come a long way over the last few decades but that language conundrum remains as an unannounced quirkiness as it continues to develop. There could be quite the interruption of function should those units find that their tasking is to calculate pi to the last digit sucking up energy like a black hole going nowhere.
Pentagram awards contract to Skynet … errr I mean Scale AI.
In SyFy AI going into business for itself has long been a meme, be it Frankenstein creation or the latest movie about such a scenario, when will our elites grow up and take responsibility for their actions.
The biggest customer and patron of AI is Israel and many US tech companies have sold loads of AI technology to Israel.
See these reports.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/microsoft-israel-gaza-lebanon-donald-trump-b2700089.html
https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-azure-openai-israeli-army-cloud/
The outrageous and atrocious results in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon speak for themselves!
Social Credit Scores, AI generated kill lists, and over a 101 sneaky ways to take you out with all the medical recommendations and every other system AI monitors and has a say in. Not a good day and time to live for the politically incorrect deplorables and those deemed a drain on society, not worthy of the resources it takes for them live.
QAnother in a long line of dual use military/commercial technologies.
Two recent dynamic duals are %G/AI.
And silly villians[slang fo civilians] are right smack dab in its center cross-hairs.
Coincidental?
As your Chat Box?
Do they even hear themselves ? ‘allowing planners to more rapidly synthesize vast amounts of information, generate multiple courses of action’
Synthesise/Synthesize = to form or produce, to produce from multiple sources as if new.
They are going to manufacture information.
They are going to make things up, and then decide what to do based upon this made-up information.
Sounds about right.
Garbage in, garbage out.
The modern Belial group’s Tuaoi Stone that will lead to another great reset. Hopefully some humans survive to start the process all over again. Humanity hasnt been able to control technological advancements getting into the hands of the ever present psychopaths and sociopaths. Humanity hasnt progressed to limit psychopaths and sociopaths elevating themselves into positions where they can create chaos and death.
While I hope you are wrong, history often tends to be repetitive . Can we keep psychotic AI programs and programmers out of the defense program matrix we feel we must rely on to prevent our own first attack destruction ? I can only hope and pray that sanity finds a way.
Viva Las Vegas! The casino algorithm is rigged, so, that the bank always wins, with a devil in disguise.
Trump and Putin are playing Russian roulette, making poker faces, and taking bets, in a game change.