AI programs operated by the armed forces are keeping an eye on digital spies.

Armed Forces Creates Algorithms Which Act Like Bond on Steroids

The spy game has long been fun to write books about and make films about. The popular movies about the spy James Bond always showed him with the coolest, most unimaginable tools to fight the bad guys. His Austin Healy sports car with the rockets and machine guns was cutting-edge technology in its day.

The real spy game has come a long way since Bond.

Our armed forces are adding AI to the equation of keeping America’s eyes on the world of bad guys. Michael Tucker has penned a great piece about the current state of AI in intelligence gathering for defenseone.com. Tucker writes about what could go wrong when humans try to provide oversight on intelligence that is really difficult to supervise.

Tucker writes about a the guy that’s leading the supervision efforts: Dean Souleles is working to put AI into practice at different points across the U.S. intelligence community, in line with the ODNI’s year-old strategy. The chief technology advisor to the principal deputy to the Director of National Intelligence wasn’t allowed to discuss everything that he’s doing, but he could talk about a few examples.

At the Intelligence Community’s Open Source Enterprise, AI is performing a role that used to belong to human readers and translators at CIA’s Open Source Center: examining news articles from around the world to monitor trends, geopolitical developments and possible crises in real-time. It all began in 1941 with $150,000 from President Franklin Roosevelt’s emergency fund and a building at 316 F Street in Washington, DC. Though it may have sounded like an early start-up venture, it was instead the beginnings of the Open Source Enterprise (OSE), which celebrated its 75th anniversary this year. Soules went on to say:

“Imagine that your job is to read every newspaper in the world, in every language; watch every television news show in every language around the world. You don’t know what’s important, but you need to keep up with all the trends and events,” Souleles said. That’s the job of the Open Source Enterprise, and they are using technology tools and tradecraft to keep pace. They leverage partnerships with AI machine-learning industry leaders, and they deploy these cutting-edge tools.”

AI is also helping the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, notify sailors and mariners around the world about new threats, like pirates, or new navigation information that might change naval charts. It’s a mix of open source and classified information. And the big question of course, is how do you keep the bad guys from hacking your spyware?

Another of our spy agencies that is very deep in AI and is always under pressure to keep it within certain bounds is the CIA.

As the Central Intelligence Agency harnesses machine learning and artificial intelligence to better meet its mission, insiders are aggressively addressing issues around bias and ethics intrinsic to the emerging tech. Brandi Vincent wrote a piece for nextgov.com about how much the CIA  is doing to meet and not exceed its authority.

“We at the agency have over 100 AI initiatives that we are working on and that’s going to continue to be the case,” Benjamin Huebner, the CIA’s privacy and civil liberties officer said Friday at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington. “That’s a big complicated issue that we are very much thinking about all the time.”

You may have seen the ads during the NFL games when they show a play and give the AI predictions of success or failure in split seconds. That technology raise questions about gambling and what happens if gamblers are suing AI to beat the odds. To be fair the NFL owners are using medical AI programs to improve player health and longevity.

It won’t be long before AI will help improve your health as a routine matter when you visit the doctor online for certain ailments.

From keeping an eye on the bad guys, to keeping 300-pound linebackers healthy, it’s just a fact that AI is making a paradigm shift of our world. Below are links to two in-depth articles about technology even James Bond would be impressed with.

read more at defenseone.com or nextgov.com