interface and automation

Paraphrase from The Simpsons wherein Bart and Lisa go to military school: The wars of the future will be fought by machines. Your job as soldiers will be the cleaning and maintenance of those machines.

A recent 60 Minutes story defines the present state of human-machine interaction in warfare. In Afghanistan, the U.S. military dropped a bomb on a house where a suspected Taliban supporter lived. It did so in response to an RPG that had been fired at a U.S. base (it missed, badly). The air strike didn’t kill the suspected Taliban supporter but rather 8 members of his family, mostly old men, women and children.

The story described the basic method being used to order an air strike. Soldiers on the ground did initial investigations of the house the day before and requested the strike. Someone at a U.S. Air Force control center in the Middle East had to make the final decision based on the report from the ground, grid coordinates, time, tonnage, etc. The Air Force allowed 60 Minutes to film the control center, which was filled with large screens and banks of computer operators (imagine the big board from Dr. Strangelove perched above telemarketing cubicles).

Even if war machines have predatory capabilities and sophisticated AI, would the result have been any different? Probably not, because it seems as if the decision was largely deductive. The U.S. should eliminate its enemies; an enemy lives in that house; therefore, a bomb should be dropped on that house. A machine could make that terrible, simplistic decision.

De Landa’s argument is that, in order for machines to be effective without human interface, information processing would have to at least demonstrate that it could be used to automate self-organizing processes using a complex singularity. The key to this would be the development of inductive and heuristic reasoning, or learning from experience and making good judgments, and the inability to generate this in a machine at a sophisticated level is the reason the U.S. military must utilize a human interface. There is a certain merit to this argument between automation and interface. Interface, at least for the military, is a temporary fix to a problem with automation not easily resolved. Once, resolved, at least humans can still interface with machines with a cloth and some polish.