Global Guerrillas

Game ON: the end of the old economic system is in sight

Google is a pioneer in limited artificial general intelligence (aka computers that can learn w/o preprogramming them). One successful example is AlphaGo.  It just beat this Go Grandmaster three times in a row.  

 

What makes this win interesting is that AlphaGo didn't win through brute force.  Go is too complicated for that: 

...the average 150-move game contains more possible board configurations — 10¹⁷⁰ — than there are atoms in the Universe, so it can’t be solved by algorithms that search exhaustively for the best move.

 

It also didn't win by extensive preprogramming by talented engineers, like IBM's Deep Blue did to win at Chess.  

 

Instead, AlphaGo won this victory by learning how to play the game from scratch using this process:

• No assumptions.  AlphaGo approached the game without any assumptions.  This is called a model-free approach.  This allows it to program itself from scratch, by building complex models human programmers can't understand/match.
• Big Data.  It then learned the game by interacting with a database filled with 30 million games previously played by human beings.  The ability to bootstrap a model from data removes almost all of the need for engineering and programming talent currently needed for big systems.  That's huge. 
• Big Sim (by the way, Big Sim will be as well known as Big Data in five years <-- heard it here first). Finally, it applied and honed that learning by playing itself on 50 computers night and day until it became good enough to play a human grandmaster.

The surprise of this victory isn't that it occurred.  Most expected it would, eventually...  

 

Instead, the surprise is how fast it happened.  How fast AlphaGo was able to bootstrap itself to a mastery of the game.  It was fast. Unreasonably fast.

 

However, this victory goes way beyond the game of Go.  It is important because AlphaGo uses a generic technique for learning.  A technique that can be used to master a HUGE range of activities, quickly.  Activities that people get paid for today.

 

This implies the following:

• This technology is going to cut through the global economy like a hot knife through butter.  It learns fast and largely on its own.  It's widely applicable.  It doesn't only master what it has seen, it can innovate.  For example: some of the unheard of moves made by AlphaGo were considered "beautiful" by the Grandmaster it beat.  
• Limited AGI (deep learning in particular) will have the ability to do nearly any job currently being done by human beings -- from lawyers to judges, nurses to doctors, driving to construction -- potentially at a grandmaster's level of capability.  This makes it a buzzsaw.
• Very few people (and I mean very few) will be able to stay ahead of the limited AGI buzzsaw.   It learns so quickly, the fate of people stranded in former factory towns gutted by "free trade" is likely to be the fate of the highest paid technorati.  They simply don't have the capacity to learn fast enough or be creative enough to stay ahead of it.

Have fun,

 

John Robb

 

PS:  Isn't it ironic (or not) that at the very moment in history when we demonstrate a limited AGI (potentially, a tsunami of technological change) the western industrial bureaucratic political system starts to implode due to an inability to deal with the globalization (economic, finance and communications) enabled by the last wave of technological change?

PPS:  This has huge implications for warfare.  I'll write more about those soon.  Laying a foundation for understanding this change first.

Clip-on Robotics for Cars, Planes, and Ships

How does a global transportation system become a robotic transportation system almost overnight? 

The answer is clip-on robots.  

Robots (and their sensors) that you simply clip onto the driver's seat of the vehicle.  

It sees what the driver/pilot/captain would see, both outside and in.  It uses the same controls to control the vehicle.  It hears the same things.  

Simple.  Effective.  Inexpensive.  Fast.

Here's an example of clip-on robot that can ride a motorcycle from Yamaha.

  

This approach gets around the need to rewire vehicle.  Rewiring, as every engineer and mechanic knows makes things difficult.  Simply, if you open up the control panel of a vehicle to modify it, the costs of installation go up exponentially and the regulatory burden (testing, certification, authorization) becomes insanely heavy.

It also gets around the problem with replacing existing vehicles with new, specially outfitted vehicles.  That will only accelerate once the value of the new transportation system is demonstrated.

NOTE:  This is very similar to how the big installed base of PCs were automagically converted "overnight" into Internet computers by simply adding a modem and some software...

This conversion will also be fairly inexpensive.  All of the tasks associated with driving, flying and sailing can be accomplished using cameras and microphones.  Although useful and increasingly affordable, complex sensors like LiDARs aren't required due to rapid advances in deep learning (Musk and Tesla are betting on this approach).  

At the rate things are going, we'll see clip-on driving/flying/sailing systems in the mainstream within a decade  Once that happens, the costs, benefits (1,000% safer than self-driving), etc. of these systems will make them ubiquitous soon thereafter.  

Have fun,

John Robb

@johnrobb (twitter)

PS:  Clip-ons are asymmetric.  For example:  Clip-ons could potentially turn any vehicle into a VBIED.  They also allow a military that is behind to catch up fast with better funded institutions (think: how wireless phones allowed countries to leapfrog over wired infrastructure).  

A Global Robotic Transportation System is Almost Here

Here's some thinking on the robotic transportation system that's headed our way.  I believe it will arrive far faster than everyone suspects.  

The shift to robotic transportation is already underway.  Tens of thousands of cars are self-driving already and millions more are on the way.  Millions of self-flying and self-navigating drones were sold this year alone.  This revolution is even reaching the industrial level.  The UK is testing convoys of driverless trucks on the M3 (and in the US, Nevada has already licensed a self-driving rig for highway use in Nevada) and

Rolls Royce is working on container ships that save the 40% of the cost of crewed ships.

However, there's a problem.  

All of these robotic vehicles are largely disconnected or they are using their own proprietary means of networking their activity.   In order for robotic transportation to explode, it will need a simple protocol for coordinating this network in a decentralized way.  That's already underway, although with very little of the importance I would allocate to it given the immensity of its potential impact.  It appears to be on the right track though.  Early indications are that this standard will be as simple and decentralized as TCP/IP (any extraneous detail on it, will slow its implementation and utility).

Once this scalable decentralized standard is developed, it will do for air, sea, land, and undersea transportation what the Internet did for the movement of data and in about the same amount of time.  The change will be rapid as billions of robotic vehicles rapidly connect to this global grid providing things like (these are consumer examples, but you can extrapolate some military applications based on them):

• Free car transportation.  Order a self driving car on your cell phone, it's there in less than 5 minutes to pick you up.  It will likely be free.  How so?  The value of selling services to the person in the vehicle is far greater than the cost of providing the service (electric self-driving fleet vehicles are very inexpensive to own/operate).  
• Drone delivery.  The local farmer delivers fresh eggs to you every day via drone delivery.  Small package delivery via drones that pick up and deliver small packages.  5 miles in ten minutes for $0.25 a delivery.   New industries explode by using this network as a platform.  
• Perpetual nomads.  People live in their self-driving vehicle (RV with a twist).  They travel at night while sleeping, jumping from place to place to get a charge, enjoy the locale, and get supplies.

Here's a short video to get a taste for how different a robotic transportation network would feel.  Although this video is a bit over the top, it's safe to say that robotic transportation will be much faster, cheaper, and safer (1/10 the fatalities).   For example, with robotic vehicles nobody would have to stop at a 10x10 intersection, they could just interleave at full speed.  

 

Sincerely,

John Robb   Twitter: @johnrobb

PS:  Of course, all of this is for naught if the US isn't in the lead on setting this standard and quick to implement it nationally.  If this doesn't happen.  If the US lets the bureaucracies at the DMV and the FAA slow this effort down, the US will likely lose the entire robotic transportation industry to the place that does.  Think about this; what would the US and the Internet look like today if the FCC had allowed the telcos to crush the early Web, and it started in China or the EU instead?  How would this impact national defense?  << this is something that Bob Work needs to focus on....

JOURNAL: Why the Technorati screws up

My friend Nassim Taleb (the well known philosopher of decision making) adds to our understanding of why the Technorati routinely make bad decisions (from the management of the economy to national security to social policy).  It also explains why they screw up without taking responsibility for it.

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.

The Hollow State Politics: The Left Behinds vs. Technorati

The shift from a marginally functional nation-state in manageable decline to a hollow state often comes suddenly..."Onward to a Hollow State"

The western-style democratic nation-state is in deep decline. As I've been warning for nearly a decade, the nation-state as we've known it is rapidly hollowing out.  Simply, this century's spike in globalization, financialization, and technological change is gutting it and there's nothing that can be done about it.  Further, this decline isn't a secret anymore.  It's real and tangible and visible -- it's playing out in US politics right now.

Recently, we hit a new milestone in this decline.  The forces hollowing us out have enabled the development of a unified ruling class. A class united by global outlook, education, financial success, status, and technological adoption.

This milestone became crystal clear after Super Tuesday, when everyone in the establishment, from the Democratic and Republican party regulars to the media elites to academic policy wonks to senior government employees to the heads of large corporations and financial firms, banded together to denounce Trump.

In that moment, connected as they were on social networks to confront their existential enemy, America's technorati was born.

The technorati, a group held together by social networking and unified by common values. A group that strongly senses it has more in common with the technorati of different countries than it does with the other people living in this country.  A group that now understands their common interests are far more important than the petty political issues, party loyalties, and policy nuances that divide them.  

Of course, the only problem facing the technorati is that it is a very small slice of the population.  A small segment of the population that isn't growing.  Globalization, financialization, and rapid technological change is not delivering the improvements it promised -- at least, not to anyone but the technorati.  The rest of America is being left behind.  

The left behinds are the supermajority of Americans getting creamed by the hollowing out of America.  

Americans who lose more good good jobs, benefits, and status with each passing year. Americans who went deep into debt for college (in order to ascend to a slot in the technorati) but are perpetually underemployed. Americans who work all day but can only make enough to buy food with the money they earn.  Americans now adrift in an America so culturally unmoored, it makes the “people of walmart” not only possible, but common.

The problem for the technorati is that the left behinds are starting to realize they've been conned.

They are starting to find their political voice, and their candidates want big changes.   A demand that will only grow more intense as the hollowing out of America continues.

Trump's Insurgency (a must read)

Trump is trouncing the competition.  He's doing so well that the prediction systems give him a 81% chance of winning the nomination -- despite the opposition of the entire Republican establishment. 

  

What's most surprising to many pundits and analysts is that Trump has done this without presenting all of the detail plans, voluminous position papers, etc. that we've come to expect over the last couple of decades.

He has simply refused to play by those rules, and he's not paid a price for it.

Trump is able to pull this off because he's not running a political campaign.  Instead, he's running an insurgency.  

Not only that, it's a very specific type of insurgency.   A type of insurgency so effective, it held the US at bay in Iraq for years, drove oil prices to $147 a barrel in 2007, and toppled governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Libya.  

This means he is playing by very different rules than his competitors.  Let me walk you through an example of what I mean by that.  

Candidates typically take positions on a range of issues.  These issues serve as a means of attracting a coalition of voters energized by these issues.  An open source insurgency works differently.  It forms around a single idea.   In Trump's insurgency, the central idea is seen in a tweet he made on the 29th of February:

It's a simple promise.  It says:  I'll Represent You and Your Needs as President   

That's it.  It might not seem revolutionary, but in a country where big money owns the political system, the middle class is being shredded, and politicians are afraid of offending anyone, this is a big deal.  

With this promise in hand, Trump executed on the second important step in open source insurgency.  He demonstrated that this promise was plausible.  He's won again and again.  Growing with each win.

This explains why:

• Trump doesn't take policy positions on the small issues most campaigns are built on.  Those positions would only divide his insurgency.  
• Trump will ONLY talk about corruption, hypocrisy, underhandedness etc. of the people opposing him.
• Trump gains ground when he is attacked by the media, the corrupt, and special interests.  These attacks demonstrate his devotion to the promise of his campaign.  

Regardless of what you think about this, his insurgency is effective... note turnout in South Carolina in 2016.

This suggests that Trump's insurgency also has the capacity to take the White House this fall.  

Have fun,

John Robb

PS:  I'll post more about this later.  

PPS:  I've also worked out an unconventional strategy for Trump to win in the fall (against all comers).  Not sure if I'll post that though.  Haven't figured out one for Bernie though.  It doesn't look like it will matter much since the Democratic machine is currently strangling him in the primaries.

Deep Maneuver (Autonomous Robotic Weapons)

Many cyber weapons are designed for deep maneuver.  These virtual weapons drift across the Internet, jumping from computer to computer to computer, potentially travelling for years until they find the target they were designed to destroy.  

Deep maneuver is also possible with autonomous robotic weapons in the real, physical world.  I'm not talking about the minimal performance improvements  achieved by removing the weight of a pilot or crew from a manned system.  Instead, I'm talking about autonomous robotic systems that can undertake missions that last for years and traverse tens of thousands of miles. 

Let's dig into this idea a bit.

The earliest example of robotic deep maneuver I've found is an operation from WW2 called Fu-Go. Fu-Go was the Japanese attempt to bomb the continental US using balloon bombs. Although Fu-Go was a complete failure, I find it useful as a way to think productively about how robotic intelligence can be used to surmount physical challenges (distance, time, etc.).

Where the Fu-Go balloons landed in the US

Here are some details about Fu-Go:

• The operation began in late 1944 in November, as US B-29s began the bombing mainland Japan and a couple of months after the Germans began launching V2 rockets. Operation Fu-Go was commanded by Major General Sueyoshi Kusaba of the Imperial Japanese Army and carried out by 2,800 soldiers. These soldiers launched 9,300 balloons made with mulberry paper and held together with potato paste, by hand.
  
  
• The balloons were built to carry hundreds of pounds of explosives across the Pacific in about three days, using the winter jet stream as propulsion. In order to access the jet stream the balloons were outfitted with systems (releasing ballast and venting gas) that kept them between 30,000 and 38,000 thousand feet. Some of the balloons were outfitted with radio transmitters, so their progress could be mapped by Japanese facilities on island bases across the Pacific.
  
  
• The operation was a complete failure.  The level of robotic autonomy used by the Japanese wasn't advanced enough to overcome the challenges of the task.  For example, the Japanese predicted that 10% of the balloons would reach the US (about 900 balloons), but only 300 balloons made it.  On top of that, no major damage was done by the balloons that completed the journey.   

I find that this example provides me with some insight into how robotic weapons can make deep maneuvers like cyber weapons.   As we know, cyber weapons are already experts at using the environment for propulsion.  They use everything from open network connection to the stochastic motion of personal gadgets (cell phones, etc.) to maneuver themselves to their target.  

Autonomous robots can do the same in the physical world by substituting intelligence for mechanical performance.  This intelligence would allow them to leverage a wide variety of environmental factors to extend mission duration and range, from using wind/ocean currents to hitchhiking on vehicles (ships, trucks, aircraft, etc.) to slow self-propulsion using solar energy (or buoyancy).  Deep maneuver makes it possible to:

• Traverse an ocean.  Hide in the muck of an opponent's harbor or in the coral reef near a disputed island. Engage kinetically with PGMs when required.
• Infiltrate a remote region and set up a sensor network to monitor enemy activity and look for targets of opportunity.  Persist for a decade, permanently denying the area to opponents.  
• Fly by night.  Hide and/or recharge by day.   Tap into the opponent's electrical grid or fuel systems.  Do so until target is found/neutralized.  

Have fun

John Robb

I spent last year working for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a vision for how advanced robots will transform warfare over the next twenty years.  This year I'll share my thinking with you.  Tag along if you are interested.

Zero Day Warfare

The winner of the next big conflict will be the side with the best understanding of how to use bots in warfare. Bots aren't just an iterative improvement in warfare, like stealth or PGMs, it's a revolution in the making. The US military, to its credit, is working on this. So far, the US military has identified three (out of nearly a dozen) of the foundational ideas needed to successfully employ bots in warfare:

• Teaming
• Autonomy
• Swarming

Learning from Nitro Zeus

However, these early ideas are a long way from the operational thinking required to win wars using bots. That type of thinking requires a synthesis of the foundational ideas into new operational concepts. Here's a good example operational concept I'm calling zero day warfare. It builds off the thinking already demonstrated in recent US cyber operations:

• The US recently leaked plans for Nitro Zeus, a sweeping cyber attack on Iran to be used only if the nuclear negotiations with the country broke down.
  
  
• Nitro Zeus, building on the earlier success of the Stuxnet/"Olympic Games" (the earlier cyber attack that set back Iranian nuclear activities by destroying 1,000 centrifuges), was designed to seize control or knockout Iran's air defense system, communications grid, transportation system, and energy grid on the first day of the conflict.
  
  
• The rapid onset of chaos caused by Nitro Zeus would have then made it possible for immediate kinetic attacks on the real objective of the operation: the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordo.   

Zero Day Warfare

The goal of zero day warfare is to win the war before it starts (a very zen concept) by deeply penetrating the opponent's territory years before the conflict begins. Like all maneuver warfare, it is focused on shattering the opponent's physical and logical cohesiveness. Here's a quick summary of the highlights:

• Autonomous robots and software bots (collectively "bots") deeply penetrate the opponent's territory both physically (territory) and logically (their computer systems). Most would be hidden and remain dormant until activation. Some would actively or passively map opponent networks, analyze them for vulnerabilities, and take advantage of opportunities for stealthy exploitation.
  
  
• When activated, these forward bots conduct a coordinated attack from inside the opponent's territory and systems. Damaging, degrading, or taking control of computer systems and physical infrastructure. Advanced robots would emerge from stealth to kinetically engage with opponent forces or physically seize points (airports, ports, etc.) to enable the rapid entry of conventional forces. 
  
  
• External forces, both bots and conventional, would utilize the disruption of the Zero Day attack to rapidly enter the territory and seize control of key facilities and capture remaining leadership.  

Have fun,

John Robb

PS: A zero day warfare that includes deeply deployed autonomous robots will be possible within the next decade. Almost all of the tech needed to pull it off is almost here.

____________

I spent the last year working on the Chairman's (of the JCS) vision for how advanced robots will change the face of conventional and unconventional warfare. This year I'll share my thinking with you.  Tag along if you are interested.

Why Apple is on the side of National Security and not the FBI

The FBI wants access to the encrypted data on an iphone owned by one of the the San Bernardino terrorists.  The FBI has already gotten access to the data this iphone uploaded to Apple's cloud. However, the FBI thinks there is more data on the phone that wasn't uploaded. Here's a quick recap:

• The FBI can't access information on the iphone because the brute force technique the agency uses to "guess" user passwords doesn't work with the iphone. Brute force password guessing would cause the phone to permanently block access to the data after 10 attempts if that option is turned on (and they think it is). Even with the option off, it could take up 5.5 years to crack the password, because the iphone inserts a 10 ms delay between password attempts.  
  
  
• The FBI went to court to force Apple to provide them with a way to turn off the features that prevent them from using their simple password guessing technique in the future.
  
  
• Apple refused, because it is currently engaged in a struggle with the Chinese government over the same issue. Apple knows that if it complies with the FBI on this, it will become the rope in a violent tug of war between the two governments over who gets access to encrypted iphone data. Since 25% of Apple's sales and nearly all of its growth is coming from China, it's clear they would like to avoid making a choice between the US and China.

Of course, Apple's worry doesn't make it right in this fight.  I couldn't care less if they make money or not.  They are right because, with the threats we will soon face, backdoors like this are no longer good for national security. They harm it.

• Backdoors that allow access to encrypted data, like the backdoor the FBI is demanding, can be useful in fighting blood and guts terrorism. It makes it easier to unwind terrorist cells and financing (usually after the attack though).
  
  
• However, blood and guts terrorism isn't the threat it once was. It is the last war. The growing threat will be from nations and groups armed with cognitive bots.  Bots capable of accomplishing a great number of human scale tasks very, very quickly.  In this new type of war, anything that slows or delays an attacker is worth preserving.  In this case, the difficulty of breaking the encryption on the widely used iphone is a good thing.
  
  
• In wars where bots do most of the fighting, all backdoors become a zero day vulnerabilities -- unpatched vulnerabilities that allow attackers rapid, unopposed access to the system.  Inserting vulnerabilities into the iphone would almost certainly make it useful as a major avenue of attack by the bot armed threats we'll face in the near future. 

Let's not prepare for the last war by making ourselves vulnerable to the next one.  

Why Trump Wins

"The fault line in American politics is no longer Republican vs. Democrat nor conservative vs. liberal but establishment vs. anti-establishment. This is an inevitable result of serial failure in establishment policies." Failure as a Way of Life  Bill Lind

Donald Trump is crushing the establishment candidates of the Republican party.  Sanders is doing the same with the Dems.  With that in mind, here are a few insights into Trump that I found useful:

• Donald Trump isn't a fool.  Here's a recent interview that shows Donald Trump is much more interesting than the performance art of his stump and debate.  BTW:  he's a non-interventionist when it comes to foreign policy.
  
  
• "From the start, Trump targeted the (mostly) white working class, which happens to be 40 percent of the country. And he’s done it not just with issues, but with how he talks — the ball-busting, the “bragging,” the over-the-top promises...

  But it speaks volumes — whole encyclopedias — about the ignorance of our political and media elites that they’re only now realizing that much of what Trump’s been doing is just busting balls.  It’s a blue-collar ritual, with clear rules — overtly insulting, sure, but with infinite subtleties. It can be a test of manliness, a sign of respect, a way of bonding and much more.

    America hasn’t been great for the working class for decades — which is why “Make America Great Again” is a great slogan for a guy who’s talking tough on the problems that blue-collar Americans (and more than a few middle-class folks) see as killing them."  And it is killing them:  "The rise in mortality from 1999 to 2014 was 22 percent: Up 134 deaths per 100,000 for whites aged 45 to 54 whose education ended in high school....  (due to) jumps in suicides and in deaths from drug abuse." Donald Trump has Invented a New Way to Win Mark Cunningham
  
  
• Nils Parker:  "He is the first true social media/internet candidate. He is not only harnessing its tools like no one before, but he is both speaking to and responding from the culture social media has created. It is social media more than any other influence that has created the cowed culture that the 40% white male demo he is going after feels alienated by and furious at.  
  
  The trolling, the bombast, the bragging, the conspiracies--it's quintessential Internet.  also he understands the temporariness with which all normal people treat social media engagement on Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram. It's a bottomless scroll that effectively disappears since no sane person goes scrolling back more than a week's time in order to find something to get pissed off or offended about. So he pops off and then lets it go--which his supporters fundamentally understand.   When opponents and media pull up a tweet from 2012, literally no one gives two shits and it only ends up reflecting (poorly) on the person pulling up the tweet."

 

A Robotic 9/11

Last year I was hired to craft a long term vision for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on how autonomous robots should be used to radically improve how the US military fights wars.  

This year I will be sharing my thinking with you.

_____________

The current revolution in robotics is due to rapid advances in the ability of robots to think.  

This means that most of the big improvements we'll see in the use of autonomous robots in warfare will be due to finding new uses of this attribute more than any other.  Let's explore this a bit.  

It's now possible to turn a simple low performance drone into a weapon that is nearly as effective as a precision guided missile (PGM) that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.  This is accomplished through the creative substitute inexpensive and sophisticated machine thinking for expensive mechanical performance.  

In other words, the smarter the drone is, the better it can mimic the performance of the much more expensive PGM.

This is already possible today with inexpensive, commercially available drones.  Low cost drones are now smart enough to approximate the performance of an expensive surface to surface missile system with a little creativity.   Let's dive into this a bit. 

From a mechanical perspective, consumer drones aren't that impressive:

• ~1-2 pound payload
• ~20 min flight time 
• 20-40 miles per hour flight speed

However, these drones are already very smart:

• They can fly themselves.  They can take-off, fly enroute, and land autonomously.
• They can precisely navigate a course based on the GPS waypoints you designate.
• They can now (a recent development) use digital cameras to find, track, and follow objects.  Some can even land on objects they find based on a description of that object.  

Even this basic capability is more than enough to turn a basic drone into an extremely dangerous first strike weapon. Here's a scenario that pits ten drones against a major airport:  

1. Ten drones would take off autonomously in 1 minute intervals.
2. Each would follow a GPS flightpath to a preselected portion of an airport.
3. Upon arrival, a digital camera would identify the nearest wing of an aircraft.
4. The drone would land itself in the middle of that wing.
5. A pound of thermite in the payload would ignite upon landing.  
6. The thermite would burn through the wing, igniting the fuel inside...
7. Most of the airport and nearly all of the planes on the tarmac are destroyed.

Here are the takeaways:  

• Even the simple robotic platforms of today can be extremely effective as weapons.  At current rates of improvement in machine intelligence, the situation will get much more interesting very, very soon. 
• It's possible to creatively trade inexpensive machine smarts for expensive mechanical performance.  
• We need to figure this out before the bad guys do.  However, figuring this out requires a deep insight into the dynamics driving this forward.  

 

What I've Been Doing: Working for the CJCS on the future of Warfare

I spent 2015 thinking and writing about the future of warfare while working for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Specifically, I was tasked with figuring out how autonomous robotics could/would change warfare over the next twenty years, and how the US military could exploit that change.  

Up until this effort, the US military didn't have a cohesive vision for how it would use autonomous robotics.  Now, it does (at least the first iteration of one).  The cool part, for me, is that I now have a very strong grasp for how this tech is going to roll out and how to exploit it to achieve decisive results both tactically and strategically.  

Needless to say, the change on the way due to autonomous robotics is going to be very, very disruptive.  So, absent another contract that would pay me to think/write for them, I'm going to write some of my thinking up for GG and put the rest into a book so the world can put it to use.

PS:  I'm interviewed on Episode 236 of the Robot Overlordz radio/podcast.   A general talk.

 

Germany Just Screwed Europe

Germany needs young people.  Its population is dwindling.  It doesn't have enough of them to support a rapidly aging German population.

• A smart solution to this shortfall would have been to actively recruit millions of young people from around the world -- from India to Tanzania to Argentina to Malaysia to the US.  
• Instead, for some reason, the people running Germany thought it would be a good idea to use the Syrian crisis as a way to bring millions of young people to their country. 
• It worked.  Germany imported 1.1 m migrants last year.  

However, if you dive into the details, it's clear this policy is very dangerous.

• Almost all (~800,000) of these migrants were young, single men (Canada, in contrast, refuses entry to young single men) from Syria.  Insurgencies and terrorism run on a fuel of young men.
• These young men are culturally incompatible with EU/US standards re: women, homesexuality, free speech, etc.  With a group this large and cohesive, cultural integration will be nearly impossible over any meaningful time period.
• Most of these young men (~500,000-700,000) have recent combat experience earned on the killing fields of a fractured Syria, fighting for a variety of bad causes.  This makes them potentially dangerous.

Here's how I believe this will play out:

• Social disruption will rise.  We are already seeing this with recent attacks by roving gangs of immigrants in Cologne.  Further, Schengen will disintegrate as transborder attacks by radicals ramp up.  We saw this with an attack by a "German" migrant on a police station in Paris and the flow of weapons/attackers from Brussels during the Paris attacks last year.  
• Over the medium term?  Terrorist violence.  This population, and those that soon follow, will soon become the main conduit for extremism in Europe.  Its large size, antagonism and cohesiveness will make it impossible to police.
• Over the long term?   As the demographics of these countries rapidly shift in favor of the new arrivals: open source insurgency.  An insurgency that will spread far from the borders of Germany.  An insurgency I'm not sure Germany, nor the EU, can win.

PS:  What a missed opportunity for Germany and the EU.  Instead of recruiting millions of economically and socially beneficial migrants from countries across the world...

Culture is Everything

What is culture? In the broad sense, it's a way of life.  More specifically, it's a basket of shared behaviors that determine how we solve problems, define success, and treat each other.

Culture is important. It has been proven critical to socioeconomic success, at every level, from the extremely large group to the individual (although at the individual scale, we call it character). For example, in the corporate world, most successful CEOs will tell you the same thing: culture is everything.

So, if it's so important, why don't we talk about culture more?

It isn't easy to quantify. It's not easy for bureaucrats to dictate or markets to measure.

Fortunately, there is a way to understand it a bit better. Culture is important because it plays a critical role in personal and group decision making. More specifically, it drives the "orientation" step of John Boyd's decision making model, the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop.

Orientation is different than the other steps in decision making.  It's a gut check.  A check of core values.  It is a synthesis of everything you've learned as it applies to the problem you face.  This makes it squishy and holistic.  It's the step that Einstein so elegantly referred to in this quote:

If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.

Unlike orientation, the other steps (observe, decide, act) used in decision making are largely mechanistic, analytic and quantitative. To improve these other steps, you speed them up (i.e. computers), increase their fidelity (accuracy without error), and widen their scope (more data).

In contrast, culture is how human beings have learned to speed up orientation in a dependable way.

Culture can provide any individual, organization, or country with the outlook needed to successfully orient problems repeatedly and without hesitation.

Here's an example:

Some business cultures place a high value on treating the counterparty in a transaction with respect and dignity.  In those cultures, it's important that every business transaction is a win-win, where both sides are better off for doing business together, regardless of the contractual details.  

In other business cultures, business transactions are highly competitive.  In those cultures, it's important to win every business transaction and contractual details are used as a weapon to bludgeon the counterparty into submission.

See the difference in approach due to culture?

What should also be obvious from this example is that cultures differ.  They can be wildly different.

They aren't equally effective, the usually don't mix well, and some can be toxic.

Sincerely

John Robb

PS: John Boyd developed the OODA loop to figure out how to win conflicts.  He postulated, correctly, that successful decision making is the most important factor in survival -- from simple organisms surviving evolutionary pressures in primordial pools to winning wars on modern battlefields.   Therefore, success in any conflict was largely due to faster, better decision making.  The faster you can make good decisions, the faster you can iterate to success.

The Changing Face of Illiteracy

Estimate:  2030.  About 15 years for this to become a truism.  Amazingly fast given the magnitude of the change.    

In the 19th and 20th century, illiteracy was seen as an inability to read or write.  Illiteracy damaged your economic prospects and your ability to function in society as a whole.  

With the arrival of the Internet (and the world of knowledge it connects you to), being illiterate is increasingly being seen as an inability to learn on your own.  

Learning is now a continuous lifelong activity and with the Internet available, it's largely accomplished using a self-service approach.  When you want to find something out you can usually find it on the Internet, or if you need to learn a new skill, you can usually find a course on the Internet to learn it and experts to help you out.

With the arrival of cognitive machines (using "deep learning" and other model free methods), our definition of illiteracy will change again.  Based on what I see, illiteracy will increasingly be seen as an inability to teach, coach, and train machines that learn.  

From teaching a car to drive itself to training to evaluate an insurance claim to coaching a bot to spot a person with a concealed weapon, you will find yourself in charge of helping bots learn about the world.