September 2021 – AI in Media and Society

Beyond drones: Assassination by robot?

September 20, 2021 Mindy McAdams

A Page One story in Sunday’s New York Times detailed the assassination of a nuclear scientist in Iran in November: The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine (published online Sept. 18, 2021). I was taken aback by the phrase “AI-assisted remote-control killing machine” — going for the shock value!

Here’s a sample of the writing about the technology:

“The straight-out-of-science-fiction story of what really happened that afternoon and the events leading up to it, published here for the first time, is based on interviews with American, Israeli and Iranian officials …”

The assassination was “the debut test of a high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute.”

“Unlike a drone, the robotic machine gun draws no attention in the sky, where a drone could be shot down, and can be situated anywhere, qualities likely to reshape the worlds of security and espionage” (boldface mine).

Most of the (lengthy) article is about Iran’s nuclear program and the role of the scientist who was assassinated.

The remote assassination system was built into the bed of a pickup truck, studded with “cameras pointing in multiple directions.” The whole rig was blown up after achieving its objective (although the gun robot was not destroyed as intended).

A crucial point about this setup is to understand the role of humans in the loop. People had to assemble the rig in Iran and drive the truck to its waiting place. A human operator “more than 1,000 miles away” was the actual sniper. The operation depended on satellites transmitting data “at the speed of light” between the truck and the distant humans.

So where does the AI enter into it?

There was an estimated 1.6-second lag between what the cameras saw and what the sniper saw, and a similar lag between the sniper’s actions and the firing of the gun positioned on the rig. There was the physical effect of the recoil of the gun (which affects the bullets’ trajectory). There was the speed of the car in which the nuclear scientist was traveling past the parked rig. “The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the car’s speed,” according to the article.

A chilling coda to this story: “Iranian investigators noted that not one of [the bullets] hit [the scientist’s wife], seated inches away, accuracy that they attributed to the use of facial recognition software.”

If you’re familiar with the work of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), particularly on automated anti-aircraft artillery in World War II, you might be experiencing déjà vu. The very idea of a feedback loop came originally from Wiener’s observations of adjustments that are made as the gun moves in response to the target’s movements. To track and target an aircraft, the aim of the targeting weapon is constantly changing. Its new position continually feeds back into the calculations for when to fire.

The November assassination in Iran is not so much a “straight-out-of-science-fiction story” as it is one more incremental step in computer-assisted surveillance and warfare. An AI system using multiple cameras and calculating satellite lag times, the shaking of the truck and the weapon, and the movement of the target will be using faster computer hardware and more sophisticated algorithms than anything buildable in the 1940s — but its ancestors are real and solid, not imaginary.

Killer robots already exist, and they’ve been here a very long time (Ryder, 2019)

AI in Media and Society by Mindy McAdams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Include the author’s name (Mindy McAdams) and a link to the original post in any reuse of this content.

The need for interdisciplinary AI work

September 18, 2021September 20, 2021 Mindy McAdams

Discussions and claims about artificial intelligence often conflate quite different types of AI systems. People need both to understand and to shape the technology that’s part of their day-to-day lives, but understanding is a challenge when descriptions and terms are used inconsistently — or over-broadly. This idea is part of a 2019 essay titled Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet, published in the Harvard Data Science Review.

“Academia will also play an essential role … in bringing researchers from the computational and statistical disciplines together with researchers from other disciplines whose contributions and perspectives are sorely needed — notably the social sciences, the cognitive sciences, and the humanities,” wrote Michael I. Jordan, whose lengthy job title is Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jordan’s thoughtful, very readable essay is accompanied by 11 essay-length commentaries by various distinguished people and a rejoinder from Jordan himself.

In one of those commentaries, Barbara J. Grosz emphasized that “Rights of both individuals and society are at stake” in the shaping of technologies and practices built on AI systems. She said researchers and scholars in social science, cognitive science, and the humanities are vital participants in “determining the values and principles that will form the foundation” of a new AI discipline. Grosz is Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics.

“When matters of life and well-being are at stake, as they are in systems that affect health care, education, work and justice, AI/ML systems should be designed to complement people, not replace them. They [the AI/ML systems] will need to be smart and to be good teammates,” Grosz wrote.

Concerns about ethical practices in the development of AI systems, in the collection and use of data, and in the deployment and use of technology based on AI systems are not new now, nor were they new in 2019. The idea of having the right mix of people in the room, at the table, however, has recently focused on racial, ethnic, socio-cultural and economic diversity more, perhaps, than on diversity of academic disciplines. Bringing in researchers from outside engineering, statistics, computer science, etc., can surface questions that would never arise in a group consisting only of engineers, statisticians, and computer scientists.

For me, those ideas dovetailed with a book chapter I happened to read on the previous day: “Beyond extraordinary: Theorizing artificial intelligence and the self in daily life,” in A Networked Self and Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience (2018). Author Andrea L. Guzman wrote that in many senses, AI has become “ordinary” for us — one example is the voice assistants used by so many people in a completely everyday way. Intelligent robots and androids like Star Trek’s Lieutenant Commander Data, or evil world-controlling computer systems like Skynet in the Terminator movies, are part of a view of AI as “extraordinary” — which was the AI imagined for the future, before we had voice assistants and self-driving cars in the real world.

To be clear, there still exists the idea of extraordinary AI, super-intelligence or artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the “strong” AI that does not yet exist (and maybe never will). What Guzman describes is the way people today regard the AI–based tools and systems with which they interact. The AI that is, rather than the AI that might be.

How that connects to what both Jordan and Grosz wrote about interdisciplinary collaboration in AI development is this: Guzman is a journalism professor at Northern Illinois University, and she’s writing about the ways people communicate with a built system. Not interact with it, but communicate with it. When she investigated people’s perceptions and attitudes toward voice assistants, she realized that we don’t think about Siri and Alexa as intelligent devices. I was struck by Guzman’s description of how she initially approached her study and how her own perceptions changed.

“Conceptualizations of who we are in relation to AI, then, have formed around the myth that is AI” (Guzman, 2018, p. 87). “… I was applying a theory of the self that was developed around AI as extraordinary to the study of AI that was situated within the ordinary. The theoretical lens was an inadequate match for my subject” (Guzman, 2018, p. 90).

Nvidia rules the GPU roost—for now

September 14, 2021September 14, 2021 Mindy McAdams

In an August 2021 article, The Economist examined the role of Nvidia in the current AI Spring. The writers signaled their central idea in the title: Will Nvidia’s huge bet on artificial-intelligence chips pay off?

A fair number of people don’t know much about the role of graphics-processing hardware in the success of neural networks. A neural network is a collection of algorithms, but to crunch through the massive quantities of training data required by many AI systems — and get it done in a reasonable timeframe, instead of, say, years — you need both speed and parallelism. The term for this kind of computer-chip technology is accelerated computing, and Nvidia is the market leader.

Nvidia has ridden this wave to a current market value of $505 billion, according to the article. Five years ago, it was $31 billion. Nvidia both designs and manufactures the semiconductors for which it is famous. The original purpose of these chips was to run the graphics in modern computer games — the ones where characters race through immense, detailed 3D worlds. About half of Nvidia’s revenue still comes from chips designed for running game software.

“Huge, real-time models like those used for speech recognition or content recommendation increasingly need specialized GPUs to perform well, says Ian Buck, head of Nvidia’s accelerated-computing business.”
— Will Nvidia’s huge bet on artificial-intelligence chips pay off?

So what’s the “huge bet”? Nvidia is in the midst of acquiring Arm, a designer of other kinds of fast chips, which also have the appeal of being energy efficient. The deal may or may not go through — there are European and U.K. hurdles to leap (Arm is based in the U.K.). Essentially Nvidia seeks to expand its microprocessor repertoire. The article discusses the competition among chip firms such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) — and increasingly, the biggest tech firms (e.g. Google and Amazon/AWS) are getting into the chip-design business as well.

The Economist also produced a podcast episode about Nvidia and GPUs around the same time it published the article summarized above: Shall we play a game? How video games transformed AI (38 min.). It provides a friendly, low-stress introduction to neural networks and deep learning, going back to the perceptron, and covering the dominance in AI research of symbolic systems until the late 1980s. That’s the first 10 minutes. Then video games come into focus, and how so much technology innovation has come from computer game developments. Difference between CPUs and GPUs: around 13:00. Details about Nvidia’s programmable GPUs. Initial resistance (from research scientists) to using GPUs for serious AI work: around 20:00. Skepticism toward neural networks in the early 2000s. Andrew Ng’s group at Stanford demonstrates amazing speed increases in training time, using Nvidia GPUs. ImageNet challenge, AlexNet, the new rise of neural networks. In the final minutes, Nvidia’s future, chip technologies, and stock prices are discussed.