AI and ML to Revolutionize U.S. Intelligence Community, Pentagon Official Says
blogs.nvidia.com
blogs.nvidia.com
It's going to be vulnerable to (accidentally or intentionally) biased training data, and on top of that we're making rapid progress on adversarial patterns. On top of all that, the results will be relatively inscrutable. (Yes, you can somewhat explain the results you get. But the lure of ML is that it's right most of the time, and you start trusting it. Not to mention that explanations cost time and money)
If all you care about is winning and you accept that human sentries sometimes shoot the wrong people, as all military forces do, then automation of sentry tasks makes perfect sense.
Judging from your comment you probably have seen this already. Let me throw it out there for those who haven't: https://twitter.com/daniel_bilar/status/925541876484231168
Deep learning exploits at a button press.
Quoth: For all tested DL models, on average DeepXplore generated one test input demonstrating incorrect behavior within one second while running only on a commodity laptop.
One second for triggering a failure, on any tested model. On a commodity laptop.
That's just the technology you want to entrust with intelligence tasks.
You could just take your existing labeled data and add light-medium noise to all your data (easiest with images?) and thereby get a lot more training data less prone to overfitting.
It's so obvious to me so someone must have thought of it already. So my guess is that these kinds of easy antagonist examples won't be a thing for very long.
(Note: I'm not an expert in the field, either. But the above rule works most of the time :)
First, we compute the gradient of the outputs of the neurons in both the output and hidden layers with the input value as a variable and the weight parameter as a constant.
A well designed production system would not support this.
Not sure how image processing will kill us all. That’s the conclusion that you drew.
To address your pedantic comment further, I’d like to add that speeding up image processing or event correlation would reduce the grunt work and allow the intelligence folks to be more productive. Kind of like replacing typewriters with word processors. Definitely not the end of the world as you seem to think.
It's also not clear how a lot of the classical ML can be translated into a DL setting- a lot of graph analysis [1] is traditionally solved using matrix factorisation, for instance, which doesn't directly translate into deep learning. You can find different ways of doing it with DL, but it's not as transferable.
[1]: e.g. analysing an individual's social graph. I believe that Facebook uses a lot of classical techniques, like PCA. I've heard that Facebook has been pouring a lot of money into research that uses DL on arbitrary graphs.
Government pioneered, or pushed contractors to pioneer, lots of technologies - just think about NASA.
I'm pretty sure that, with their budget, the NSA is at the forefront of technologies that can be used in their field, but they obviously don't want to disclose what they do. Adopting a publicly available technology shouldn't be difficult at all.
Analysis, and particularly extraction of actionable intelligence, is the key challenge. They have lots of analysts, for sure. But organizing and integrating their output has been a slow process. Reports, summaries of reports, summaries of summaries, etc.
So yeah, they want godlike AI ;)
I doubt the training data/AI will be accountable or visible to the citizens (yes, the analyst gets fired/van'd, but someone else takes his place).
So we're trusting the intel agencies, but they're trusting an AI to some extent. They're plainly not dumb enough to let the AI drive, but it still plays a part.
I'm not worried about an AI being able to sift data given a training set to some degree of accuracy. I'm more worried about the training set as a dark way of generating actionable intelligence, for good or bad purposes.
I'm curious about your personal experience of the benefits and costs of AI in intelligence? It seems unlikely that you will have been on the receiving end of the full potential cost of that AI.
Sure, if you believe that a radical increase in capacity to surveil everyone and exert overwhelming violence against anyone with absolute obedience would certainly never be used to destroy the lives of politically inconvenient people and tear innocents off to torture or extrajudicial assassinations, I guess it's all sunshine and fluffy bunnies.
I worry that in 5-10 years, we might be facing a blitzkreig sort of a surprise as an ai powered drone army captures a huge amount of territory before human soldiers even manage to get their pants on to defend it, setting off a new and deadly arms race.
I like your assumption that the US actually cares about moral or ethical considerations, considering how many governments they've overthrown, how many terrorists they've funded, etc...
Not to mention the fact that they are already the leaders in drone warfare, and routinely use drones to drop bombs on civilians. I really don't see them giving a fuck if an algorithm bombs a wedding instead of someone staring at a screen pressing the button...
To think in terms of countries, instead of interest groups within countries, is not even wrong. It's not countries vying for power, it's elites within a country using the elites in another country to suppress and exploit "their" populace. Two dictators in two neighboring countries might genuinely hate each other, but they still can use the other one as the perfect excuse to clamp down.
Soldiers are at best there to defend other soldiers. It's like having a debugger that can fix bugs only the debugger introduces, with the operative word being "can" -- so the net result is negative. What goes for soldiers goes for killer drones, and a white list approach, killing everyone on the planet who is not flagged for survival, would be already easier to make than, say, self-driving vehicles. We're already there, now all that remains is to sell it, and that is going butter smooth. We're still wide eyed and sleep walking, we absolutely need more powder in this keg so when it goes boom, nobody will even have time to ask anyone "what did you know, what did you choose to not learn, what did you do and what have you failed to do?".
This is the reality of power struggle (all means are in the game), but this new level of reach, spread and deep integration has been within reach and in active development for at least 200 years, and it's just going get worse. It's enabled by bureacracy, "one voter, one vote" democracy in the face of a mature media manipulation ("mind control") industry, capitalism and other trappings of civilization. ML is just going to end up automating the doctrine of FSD.
I think I'm moving out of the city to learn to live off the land, be independent and raise a family. I think it may be very interesting to see how I can use modern technology in that context, while making sure I don't absolutely depend on it.
Anyone else think it's quite possible there will be a lot of new wars in Western countries in 20-40 years, when the tipping point of replacement migration is reached?
That's it in a nutshell. The ultimate black box to bow down to. We already do this with in so many ways, just following orders, just repeating what we hear, and so on.. and people think we're become less spineless and murderous as this wet dream of sociopathy is introduced? Yeah, right. Some list biased training data as a pitfall, from the "correct" perspective that is absolutely a feature, that is the point.
> Anyone else think it's quite possible there will be a lot of new wars in Western countries in 20-40 years
In real life? I can't think of anyone I can have normal, intelligent conversations with who doesn't express worries that get flagged on HN. And I'm not talking leftist young people, I'm talking everybody, from 20 to 85.