US Military Building an AI to Predict the Future

The US military is building an AI system to predict the future, called KAIROS or “Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas.”

The new program at DARPA, the research agency of the US Dept of Defense, is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of data available to the US government and to enable contextual and temporal reasoning about complex real-world events in order to generate actionable understanding and predict how the future will unfold. The program is considered by many experts as the keystone program for the US global surveillance system.

Simply put, DARPA is engineering a techno crystal ball to predict the future. It will give the agency the capacity to manipulate rising global powers, social movements and world events. Data will be pulled from every imaginable source to calculate the probability of upcoming world events: news, social media, credit card purchases, banking transactions, telephone calls, emails, search histories, travel patterns and the weather.

Tech companies have been using a similar sort of technology when they advertise to you or offer you what you might want to buy next. While your next purchase may seem comparatively simple compared to recognizing an impending war or a bear market, it is all within reach with enough information. Seemingly benign and disconnected information may signal the likely crash of the stock market or a new social movement, like that goddamn butterfly that wiped out south Florida in a hurricane.

 

 

Images from the top: “Deepdream Demeure du Chaos / Abode of Chaos” by thierry ehrmann is licensed under CC BY 2.0 and Schema from DARPA