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Unconventional Warfare
The U.S. military is truly amazing, easily the best trained and equipped in the world. No other country is even close to matching us. What our politicians and military planners don’t see to understand, is that the rest of the world knows this, especially our enemies! Tactics and strategies always change to new realities, which is why war is so costly and unpredictable. There may be no lesson in history that we’ve more often failed to learn.
Beyond the Hype
Just a reminder that computers cannot “think.” Digital electronic circuitry allows two states: on or off. Put another way, True or False, Yes or No. For example, I can program a computer to say, “What is your first name?” Next, I can say, “IF the First_Name = ‘Bill’ Then Ask ‘Do you like to visit islands?'” If the answer to that is Yes, I can write a step to ask, “Are these islands frequented by billionaires and powerful politicians?”…and so on until the computer has used “artificial intelligence” to conclude its talking to Bill Gates or Bill Clinton. A.I. just expands this concept to billions of little such questions and branches of decision trees. So-called artificial intelligence has existed for decades. It’s become all the rage nowadays because we have the storage compacity, memory, and processing power to navigate these trees in seconds, along with endless mountains of data from the web for input. The pros, cons, and dangers of A.I. are based on this data put into the systems and the humans programming them.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Meme Gallery
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I’m not disagreeing with what you say, although a few of your statements are a bit too generic, and one that’s not quite correct.
First, the generic: You say that “electronic circuitry allows two states” – it really should say “digital circuitry” as there is an entire class of analog electronic devices – comparitors, amplifiers, etc. for distinctly analog purposes. And secondarily – there is a class of computing hardware (although not in widespread use) that uses trinary instead of binary – 3 distinct states instead of two. Those 3 states are represented in a couple different ways, but the easiest to explain would be the representation of +1, 0, and -1.
Second – the thought that computers can’t think for themselves is not _quite_ true. Your take on current digital AI is correct, but – there’s a class of programmable computing device arrays that go by a couple different acronyms: FPGAs and CPLDs. FPGAs are Field Programmable Gate Arrays and CPLDs are Complex Programmable Logic Devices. Think of them as EPROMs on steroids. Lots of steroids. 🙂
There has been some research into giving these devices a simple objective and base programming that didn’t quite fit the objective. They were configured to allow them to reprogram themselves to see if that objective has gotten better or worse. For a simplistic example: let’s say the objective was “output a square wave.” The device would measure the baseline, then it would modify its own configuration and test again, until it fit the objective better than what its base programming was. They did this on several different devices, and they all reprogrammed themselves to fit the objective correctly, but each device did it in different ways. A few of the devices even used flaws or quirks in some of the logic blocks, using digital-only blocks in an analog manner that “shouldn’t have worked” but did.
Again, it’s a simplistic take, but if this concept were “scaled up” it could have the potential to evolve (eventually) into something resembling actual artificial intelligence – not the crap we have today.
Which scares the crap out of me!