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America's Data-Swamped Spy Agencies Pin Their Hopes On AI (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes Phys.org:
Swamped by too much raw intel data to sift through, US spy agencies are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to crunch billions of digital bits and understand events around the world. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for technology development, said this week the CIA currently has 137 different AI projects, many of them with developers in Silicon Valley. These range from trying to predict significant future events, by finding correlations in data shifts and other evidence, to having computers tag objects or individuals in video that can draw the attention of intelligence analysts. Officials of other key spy agencies at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington this week, including military intelligence, also said they were seeking AI-based solutions for turning terabytes of digital data coming in daily into trustworthy intelligence that can be used for policy and battlefield action.
"The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
1) If you need to collect everything, it's because you don't know what you want.
2) Collecting everything is expensive and usually wrong because data ages differently.
3) A pile of inaccurate data does not become more accurate the more data you have.
4) Confirmation bias is an omnipresent risk.
5) Priming is an omnipresent risk.
6) The sub group of people who make up the defence and intelligence communities have their own outlooks, biases and foibles, like the rest of us.
7) The 'we must do something with this since data we have it' is a variant of the sunk costs fallacy.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.