AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Do you know what the OODA loop is?”
Pace made a little face of annoyance. “Of course. It’s a paradigm of combat. Observe, orient, decide, act. The proper sequence of action to engage an enemy.”
“Exactly,” Reynolds said. “In a fight between two parties, the party able to cycle through the OODA loop faster will be the winner.”
“What does this have to—”
“U.S. policy states, unequivocally, that we cannot use any weapons that do not have a human being in the kill chain. We can have weapons with autonomous characteristics, but a person must be involved somewhere in the decision-making process before any lethal act is carried out.”
Pace knew all this, so his next comment was a statement, not a question. “And China has no such rules.”
“Of course they don’t, because they want to win. We…or I should say, our leaders, want to look virtuous while we are overmatched by a superior enemy.”
Pace was aware there were two distinct schools of thought on the subject, and now he saw that Reynolds and his boss, the late Rick Watt, were both from the school of aggressive development of autonomous weapons.
Pace said, “Let’s forget about who killed him, and let’s focus on the why. Any chance he wasn’t killed for what he was trying to do? Could he have been killed for something he knew?”
Reynolds cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“Some specific technology he was trying to acquire, some specific weapon another nation had developed that he was trying to combat with acquisitions of tech from private companies.”
Reynolds thought a moment. “His fear was the same as everyone who knows anything about deep neural networks and machine learning. His fear was AGSI.”
“Artificial general superintelligence,” Pace said. It was the dreaded end state of AI, a synthetic sentience. Cognition. Machines that think like humans, albeit better, faster, and utterly without remorse.
And, as far as Pace knew, it was also bullshit. “Most experts say AGSI is a pipe dream.”
Reynolds shrugged. “Rick was worried about everything the Chinese have taken from the West. He saw a pattern in their acquisitions. And the pattern was that the technology existed for machines to teach themselves, to write their own code, to grow to the level of superintelligence and reasoning. He believed AGSI was coming, and he believed we were not ready for it.”
Pace said, “So the Chinese are more advanced than us because there is no political will in the West to go all in on autonomous weapons?”
“It’s that, but there’s another component to it. The Chinese own the world’s largest datasets.”
“Explain.”
“Many of the biggest social media companies around the world are owned by Chinese conglomerates. Even Western ones. And the social media companies owned by Westerners, they’ve all been compromised at one time or another. The data the Chinese suck up about each and every person is unimaginable. Fuck, the Chicoms even have their own DNA registries in the West. The average American spits in a cup and sends it off to a lab to find out if they are some long-lost princess or something. But they don’t know, and probably don’t care, that some spook or scientist in Beijing now knows what diseases they’re most susceptible to, who all their relatives are, whatever.
“You feed all this data into computers in China, and pump it into a growing AI agent that has the ability to learn, to optimize itself…where does that leave you?”
Pace cocked his head. “Where does that leave us?”
Reynolds shrugged as if the answer were obvious. “Armageddon. Look, I think the U.S. needs to build lethal autonomous weapons now, because the day the Chinese go online with platforms we can’t defend ourselves against, it will be too late. But I am also just as terrified about what hell we might unleash as I am about what China can do.
“It’s a dangerous world coming, and Rick Watt knew it. Whether he knew something I don’t, some specific tech, some certain AGSI on the horizon, I don’t know, but I do know the Chinese killed him because he was the biggest advocate of creating the only defenses that will be able to stop them in the future.”
“If you had to guess,” Pace asked, “what platform are we talking about? Will the Chinese put this on a pilotless aircraft, a weaponized satellite, what?”
Reynolds put his hands up. “Take your pick. Rick used to say, anything that can be electrified can be cognitized. Let that soak in a minute.”
Pace did so. Finally, he asked, “What do I need to know that I haven’t asked?”
Reynolds became pensive, distant. Pace didn’t interrupt the man’s thoughts. Finally, the former Air Force colonel said, “Up until about a year ago, Director Watt had been working on a project through DARPA.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was an R&D arm of the Department of Defense that focused on emerging technologies, and in his work on proliferations at CIA, Jim Pace had consulted with DARPA many times.
“What kind of project?”
“Project Mind Game. It was an advanced networked artificial intelligence platform, and it was developed by private firms from across the U.S., even some abroad.”
