The U.S. military, algorithmic warfare, and big tech

https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/08/the-u-s-military-algorithmic-warfare-and-big-tech/

94 58 7 years ago

remarkEon• 7 years ago

“We are going to be shocked by the speed, the chaos, the bloodiness, and the friction of a future fight in which this will be playing out, maybe in microseconds at times. How do we envision that fight happening? It has to be algorithm against algorithm,” Shanahan said during a conversation with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google VP of global affairs Kent Walker.

So, A Taste of Armageddon[1]?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

bransonf3• 7 years ago

Human motivations truly are something strange.

We discovered and innovated heavily on amazing pieces of technology (Computers, Web, Phones, Efficient Algorithms). And seemingly, the two foremost use cases have become to captivate people’s attention to sell them ads, and to threaten the lives of people we disagree with ideologically. (War, mass surveillance) Just look at what China has done to the Uighurs.

I often worry about the direction we’re heading. While it is undeniable that fewer people are dying due to war, maybe we’re just moving the agony elsewhere.

For every startup that begins with the ambition to make money, there lack in startups that actually aim to address a problem. Yet, somehow we manage to convince ourselves that food delivery, ride sharing, or scooters are somehow going to fix our most primal issues.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

And seemingly, the two foremost use cases have become to captivate people’s attention to sell them ads, and to threaten the lives of people we disagree with ideologically.

In my highly unscientific observation those use cases are minuscule in comparison to entertainment (Netflix/Hulu/YouTube shows, funny cat videos, arguing with idiots on Reddit, reading the news, reading blogs, pornography, reading HN, etc, etc).

Aperocky• 7 years ago

And in that it serve us well. Upon reflection, it is clear that most of our energy are spent on entertainment and it’s whats making our lives and the economy more fulfilling.

bransonf3• 7 years ago

I totally agree. My original comment was a bit narrow, but by captivate attention I meant platforms of consumption. But in many of those platforms, I’m willing to bet that an equal or proportionally larger amount of development is in advertising.

YouTube for example: Making a large scale video platform is a challenge, but then using that to generate revenue is probably the bigger challenge.

moltensodium• 7 years ago

I have never met a startup founder that wanted to address a problem or improve the world. Instead they all want to make sure that the Series A investors are happy. Nothing else really matters besides doing whatever the investors think will make number go up.

One time I almost got involved with a person who truly wanted to improve the world, but didn't get the job.

Outside of that one person I almost met 15 years ago, literally every founder in tech I've interacted with is just trying to run the ponzi scheme and get to that exit event, consequences be damned, employees be damned, profit be damned.

Maybe there are some good people in tech, but I still haven't met them after a whole career in this industry. Just a lot of people who make number go up like they're told to.

*edit I think this comment will be very poorly received and downvoted to -100000 karma, but honestly typing it out has made me realize I just fucking hate this industry with every fiber of my being. Every new platform and channel and tool gets completely subverted by ever more intrusive and personalized advertising, and the total data surveillance ecosystem of the big tech giants ensures that they will be able to kill or consume any truly good business idea before it gets off the ground. I think I'm done. Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.

dekhn• 7 years ago

Plenty of the startup founders I've worked with want to address a problem and improve the world. They were also working to keep investors happy because otherwise they would not have the opportunity.

balt_s• 7 years ago

Hang in there, man.

mistrial9• 7 years ago

mobile != all computing; agree about many founders in the mobile space. Just met yesterday with a colleague who is a tech manager now for outsourcing facial recognition systems, unsure if he is allowed to know who the clients are during a build. He kept trying to take pictures of me with his phone and laughing at my disdain.. he said "you are too shy" several times.. ugly

Aaronstotle• 7 years ago

Although I get your frustration, I think it's too early to say there won't be a shift in the field. More people are becoming aware of the mass surveillance and globs of data collection which means that someone can make money making a startup that "Does X, but doesn't sell your data". Maybe _I'm_ the one who's too optimistic, but projects like Monero show me that there's people who care about privacy to create/maintain a digital cash equivalent.

AndrewKemendo• 7 years ago

An interesting irony here is that almost every founder I know who started a company that failed outright or went bankrupt were primarily ideologically motivated.

Whereas the successful founders were the ones who chased the bottom line, improve the world is a benefit.

I fall into the first camp, though I got lucky with an acquisition. However it tainted me on startups and business in general actually having the ability to be ideological. At the end of the day people need to get paid, otherwise it's a volunteer organization, and volunteer organizations don't scale.

eaandkw• 7 years ago

I agree. In fact I have often said that I think the internet was a mistake. And I mean it. It seems that right now the only point of the internet is to deliver adds and take more and more ownership from people so as to put everything in the cloud. And I am tired of micro payments.

I guess this is surveillance capitalism at it's best.

wglb• 7 years ago

I have met three among the small handful that I know. I am pretty sure that there are many more out there.

If you hate this industry, HN is an odd place to hang out.

Also don't complain about downvotes.

shantly• 7 years ago

Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.

I'm coming around to a the-medium-is-the-message / technological-determinism perspective on the Internet, that it cannot exist as anything like the way it is now and mostly be a force for good. Just can't.

Always on ubiquitous wireless Internet. Decent battery tech so you don't need a power cable to everything. Low-powered cheap computers and sensors (cameras, microphones, those creepy human-body radars Google's about to start putting in phones). Storage so cheap you can collect everything. Algorithms to sift through it.

I don't see any possible way for all those things to exist and for the results not to be, overall, disastrous.

I also see exactly no way to stop it.

nl2• 7 years ago

I have never met a startup founder that wanted to address a problem or improve the world.

I don't know where you live or work, but wow this is the complete opposite to my experience.

Clubber• 7 years ago

I'm with you on the disheartening of the tech industry I held in such high regard 20 years ago. I have a problem though: what else am I going to do for a living?

s_y_n_t_a_x• 7 years ago

Most of this technology was developed because of war. We can thank the Cold War and WWII for most of it.

We see the largest strides in innovation when we're pitted against each other and the stakes are high and clear.

caseysoftware• 7 years ago

It's been a while now but while I (briefly) worked on my Masters, we analyzed technology development and what drove it.

Surprisingly (at the time), war and sex tend to drive the vast majority of it. GPS, microwaves, the internet, and many medical treatments had roots in national defense. VHS over Betamax and high speed internet adoption came from porn. We identified hundreds of big and little things in many industries.

bransonf3• 7 years ago

Did your lab ever publish anything on the subject?

If so, I’d love to read it.

carapace2• 7 years ago

I thought it was more or less axiomatic that sex and death are the two main drivers of all human culture. (Because evolution.)

Braggadocious• 7 years ago

It's society deciding who breeds and who doesn't. It's a belief that's existed since Francis Galton that we can quantify the traits of humans, and that, like Gregor Mendel controlled the color of flowers, we can quantify and control those human traits.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 7 years ago

We discovered and innovated heavily on amazing pieces of technology (Computers, Web, Phones, Efficient Algorithms).

A lot of the research efforts that discovered these things were funded by governments for the purpose of conducting war more effectively and efficiently. The internet was created to maintain command and control in the advent of a nuclear war. A lot of operations research was about improving factory production of war materiel. The desire to simulate nuclear explosions drove a lot of super computing research (look at all the Department of Energy contracts for supercomputers).

Throughout human history, the desire to efficiently kill other humans without being killed yourself has driven a lot of technology development, and this is unlikely to change in the future.

bumblebee4• 7 years ago

How can you escape survival of the fittest? With 8G people, it's a numbers game. Even if one or the other is driven by interesting motivations, is that a strategic advantage the competition for the fittest business processes?

est• 7 years ago

We discovered and innovated heavily on amazing pieces of technology (Computers, Web, Phones, Efficient Algorithms)

These technologies are funded by defence industries in the first place.

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

naringas• 7 years ago

“We are going to be shocked by the speed, the chaos, the bloodiness, and the friction of a future fight in which this will be playing out,

I think this article's focus is way off

It's more plausible that algorithmic warfare is going to make us unsure as to what is even happening. We are going to be lost, drowned, in conflicting plausible information to the point we won't even know what is going in nor who to believe

Damorian• 7 years ago

Going to be? We're already there.

joyjoyjoy• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, in the late-twentieth-century phase of the arms race, the role of unpredictable chance increased. When hours (or days) and miles (or hundreds of miles) separate defeat from victory, and therefore an error of command can be remedied by throwing in reserves, or retreating, or counterattacking, then there is room to reduce the element of chance. But when micromillimeters and nanoseconds determine the outcome, then chance enters like a god of war, deciding victory or defeat; it is magnified and lifted out of the microscopic scale of atomic physics. The fastest, best weapons system comes up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which nothing can overcome, because that principle is a basic property of matter in the Universe. It need not be a computer breakdown in satellite reconnaissance or in missiles whose warheads parry defenses with laser beams; if a series of electronic defensive impulses is even a billionth of a second slow in meeting a similar series of offensive impulses, that is enough for a toss of the dice to decide the outcome of the Final Encounter. Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid. How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle. Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation.

vsareto2• 7 years ago

What is the target of algorithm warfare supposed to be? This concept makes no sense to me.

Submarine warfare? Makes sense. You kill subs and ships and control waters. What is the algorithm seeking to control?

It doesn't even seem like a new kind of warfare, just a decision maker for existing types of warfare. So it basically has rules for land, air, sea, internet warfare and ties everything together?

Is the US President basically going to enter "control Russia" at a command line and the AI plans and executes a cold/hot war? This seems laughable.

h5erahqer4• 7 years ago

Sure, to a certain extent, algorithms are not so different than "strategies" that generals employ in response to enemy movements.

But the speed and execution of these strategies can be improved order of magnitudes as we replace more parts of the system with machines.

One can imagine Sun Tzu's chapter "Weak Points and Strong" discussing various heuristics and strategies to determine a combatant formation's weakest point. With machine algorithms, you could launch a similar probing attack instantaneously, and have the results analyzed and the striking attack coordinated before your enemy even hears the first reports of encounter.

Whirl• 7 years ago

Usually folks in the business are concerned about cyber attacks on important warfighting infrastructure (GPS satellites, for example). Cyber attacks against early warning radars, communications infrastructure, civilian power infrastructure and so on. You can imagine a battle fought solely in ‘cyberspace’ over control of critical satellites.

Sometimes electronic warfare is also lumped into this in the form of jamming or spoofing radars.

bane• 7 years ago

I agree with you. Since WW2, the trend in military weaponry and intelligence is precision.

- Instead of blowing up a submarine, why not disable the one critical crew member needed for it to launch?

- Instead of leveling a city to stop arms production, why not just infect the control systems of the factories so only plows can be manufactured and not swords?

- Cause a single screw to fall out of a piece of artillery so that it can no longer fire on target?

- Better yet, cause a fire in the iron mine so that gun can't even be manufactured.

To be effective, the affected parties wouldn't even know they were being targeted. They wouldn't even know they were at war. The lowest friction conduit your enemy civilization can proceed on is the one you want them to, and over time that's the one they'll inevitably settle into after becoming frustrated with their inability to make meaningful war on you.

In a perfect scenario, you might not even know you're attacking them either.

The series "The Golden Oecumene" explores this concept. In the story, the entire world's military might has reduced to a single sophisticated computer A.I. and a single man, who is usually cryogenically frozen and only brought out under extreme circumstances for specific operations that might include severing a single synaptic connection in a target using an x-ray laser stationed in orbit -- in order to change the target's mind.

vkou• 7 years ago

Since WW2, the trend has been the construction of bigger and bigger doomsday weapons.

Why disable one critical crew member needed for a submarine's launch, when you can kill him, the entire crew, and everyone in a 10-mile radius with a single nuclear warhead?

The only thing 'precision' weapons have been found to be any good for is bombing stone-age adversaries, without putting boots on the ground. I see no situation where nuclear superpowers can get into a high-stakes[1] shooting war which will not quickly devolve into a nuclear exchange.

[1] Low-stakes, low-commitment engagements can continue to be performed by finding a stone-age adversary that you can bomb, as a proxy for your enemy. It's great for domestic morale, great for the military-industrial complex, and great for furthering our international ambitions.

dogma1138• 7 years ago

This only works during a “Cold War” one of the goals of intelligence is to prevent war by either maintaining your balance or superiority over your enemies and once a war breaks out provide intelligence that would grant you an advantage on the battle field.

However if a full scale war ever breaks down it will definitely regress back to leveling whole cities fairly quickly because in the end of the day it’s the only way to beat an enemy.

If the enemy could not sustain low levels of attrition even if key individuals they likely wouldn’t engage in a war in the first place.

However people over estimate how much intelligence should be credited to stopping all out war vs the economics of the connected world even during the Cold War.

Trade stops wars, hence why all recent wars have been civil in nature or ones against isolated actors of little to no economic importance on a global scale.

While a war with China might break out under extreme circumstances it’s highly unlikely when the US public relies on it for anything from their tooth brushes to their iPhones.

War with Russia is also extremely unlikely since half of Europe would freeze to death, they don’t need to nuke Berlin, as shutting off the gas supply would be nearly as devastating.

Russia’s reliance on natural gas to fuel not only their economy but also their geopolitical capita is also why it reacts so aggressively against European incursion eastward that could threaten their monopoly on LPG.

What Russia fears more than 500,000 NATO troops on its border is a Royal Dutch Shell pipeline going form the Caspian Sea through the Black Sea into Europe.

So while space death rays might seem to be effective they aren’t really not are they necessary today to actually prevent conflict between the big players.

With all the death rays in the world unless you’ll be willing to kill off the entire population of your enemies as long as they have enough peasants and rifles they can wage an effective war.

For China to effectively conquer a country they only need enough guns as nukes aside even the US might not have enough conventional weapons to deal with China if they’ll go bat shit crazy and issue a gun, an inflatable raft and a parka to every able man and woman of military age and tell them to march north west till the reach Alaska then start marching south.

zelon88• 7 years ago

In a perfect scenario, you might not even know you're attacking them either.

How terrifying. To think that we could have been living in this world for 10 years now and not even realize it.

Remember the SR71 spy plane was classified for 40 years and when it was finally acknowledged after all that time it was still the fastest airplane ever created.

Military technology tends to have a guiding effect to regular technology. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that war has been guided in some capacity by AI for quite some time.

mlb_hn• 7 years ago

I think the disinformation you're thinking about matters [cf 0], but being able to project power to the right place at the right time requires a lot of logistical planning and material even if the information can be trusted. There are a lot of military areas where AI can inform traditional bureaucratic processes from planning to command and control [cf 1].

DOD maintains a lot of troops/bases/relationships around the world, and my guess is they want to be optimizing all of them as much as possible and be able to adapt policy to changes. Like any large organization, it's hard for the higher ups to have a good grasp on what's going on at lower echelons. They've had some pretty bad policy decisions handed to them from not being able to explain what was going on (e.g. the disbanding of the Baath party in Iraq). Being able to algorithmically integrate the information they've got and present it to policy makers has been an unsolved problem in its own right without the disinformation stuff.

[0] Whaley,B. (1982). "Toward a General Theory of Deception" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0140239820843710...

[1] MCDP 1. (1997). "Warfighting" https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Wa...

m463• 7 years ago

Who's to say that we're not in the middle of it now? Lots of little surgical strikes appearing to be russian hackers, heart attacks, ethical lapses and folks caught in unlucky situations?

carapace2• 7 years ago

What about the idea that technology can bring about a post-historical techno-utopia where war would be obsolete?

I mean, technology is a general amplifier, we should choose what to amplify.

ganzuul3• 7 years ago

This will also push the front-line of war back in time, because democracy is vulnerable to psy-ops.

For example, there is a lot of hatred brewing against the Chinese government caused by unverifiable claims of concentration camps. There doesn't need to be a state actor behind it. There doesn't even need to be a conspiracy. Individual people are willing to cause plausibly deniable harm for even imaginary profit. They can exploit pagerank-type algorithms based on intuition alone. Pagerank algos aren't designed for war but it is difficult to claim they didn't have a contribution in the current round of unrest in the Middle East.

The exploitation of psychology for mass-marketing has been going on since shortly after WWII. Currently market forces which are also algorithmic in nature are pushing to make mobile devices ever more addictive and it would be surprising if using AI to accelerate this process is a new idea. With 2 billion users and no ethics Facebook has become a kind of shadow government, with the power to have non-users like me frozen-out by omission by my own family. It is crazy not to be terrified of what they have done.

arcticfox• 7 years ago

For example, there is a lot of hatred brewing against the Chinese government caused by unverifiable claims of concentration camps.

"unverifiable claims" - what? Even the Chinese government admits they exist/existed [0].

Overall I think your point that it's overwhelmingly easy to confuse the truth these days is exactly right, but you're the subject in your example instead of the people you point the finger at.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/world/asia/china-xinjiang...

ganzuul3• 7 years ago

Concentration camps, not internment camps. Different claims. There are verifiable claims and then there are claims which are not verified. People look terrible when sick and dying and most people overlook that the being sick and dying is happening while receiving medical care in a hospital setting. The images from the Nazi concentration camps is something completely different.

The same thing happened after WWII where some people tacked on unverifiable claims to the long list of Nazi atrocities. A well-known debunked claim although not of atrocities is by someone claiming he was nasally administering cocaine to Hitler.

Claims like these require investigation and detract from attention given to real leads, but that takes work and people instead form mobs and repeat the most relatable claims.

I don't see why I need to spell out how to decouple my personal experience from the narrative I presented. Seems trivial to generalize.

scarmig• 7 years ago

"Unverifiable" because the PRC doesn't let independent journalists and monitors have access to the camps.

ganzuul3• 7 years ago

The unverifiable images I saw was of sick people in hospitals, and one emancipated man not inside a hospital but elsewhere.

Internment camps are bad of course, but few people seem to actually have seen the pictures taken of the holocaust. The difference is obvious. Getting independent journalists on site seems urgent.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 7 years ago

One of the big areas where AI will have a huge impact in warfare is logistics. When fighting in hostile territory (which pretty much all US wars have been since the Civil War), one of the most vulnerable parts is the supply train. Having to devote humans to drive the supplies and guard the supplies is expensive and risk prone.

Instead, I imagine that supplies will be brought to the front lines via self-driving vehicles watched over by armed drones that are programmed to destroy anything that tries to interfere with the supply convoy.

Just doing that one thing will have huge implications for the way wars are fought the the costs associated with the wars.

KineticLensman• 7 years ago

Instead, I imagine that supplies will be brought to the front lines via self-driving vehicles watched over by armed drones that are programmed to destroy anything that tries to interfere with the supply convoy.

You only need to wreck the lead vehicle in a convoy to stop those behind making any progress. A high-tech adversary could do this by a deep precision strike, and a low-tech enemy could simply emplace some mines or IEDs (remotely triggered).

gumby2• 7 years ago

War, as in pitched battles on a field, has been going away for a long time. Perpetual war, unfortunately, is back.

If you believe Clauzewitz's dictum that "war is diplomacy by any other means" then than disinformation, continual, slow, background degradation of the infrastructure of perceived enemies and the like will become the standard mode of large nation states, with actual shooting being the guerrilla/terrorist activity of those who can't afford the electronic ops. Something that also has been the nature of the world since forever (David/Goliath, US revolution, WWII partisans, Al Qaida....any so many in between).

And BTW once you have this capability wouldn't you use it internally to "ensure domestic tranquility"?

Once again The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar are highly predictive.

emilfihlman• 7 years ago

War is a special case of competition, ie competition through violence, violent competition of nations or large body actors.

But calling perpetual competition war because is questionable. We have always been influencing each other. It's not war.

gumby2• 7 years ago

I specifically don't mean perpetual "competition" so thanks for flagging that I was not clear.

I consider competition to be not just commercial competition, colonial (ugh) competition, spying and the like. Spying in fact can avert war (well understood in game theory, hence the overflight treaties).

But when spend time specifically probing and actually attacking, say, your perceived opponents' infrastructure (e.g. "cyberattack" of another country's electronic grid) I consider that warfare. Student was unambiguously an act of war, though Iran was too weak to respond (also: clever!). In particular Iran posed no threat to the US, but attacking its nuclear capabilities served US geopolitical interests (Iran did and does threaten US allies).

If you destroy or degrade someone's capabilities remotely instead of sending a high explosive, do you not consider that perpetual war? Developing such capabilities is not, inherently, war, nor is probing for weaknesses.

But if the US considers Russia an adversary (a small economy, large land and population next to various allies) I can see how someone could consider it reasonable to make it harder for its government to function. I disagree, and do consider it warfare.

freeflight• 7 years ago

It's kind of weird how the US DoD complains about lack of computation power and has to ask the private sector for help, while the NSA [0] apparently has no problem running their own AI program.

Imho way more interesting and relevant than those somewhat far-flung future concepts about fully autonomous warfare.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

The U.S. military, algorithmic warfare, and big tech

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