Pepe Escobar: The NSA does the 1980s

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-02-060214.html



The NSA does the 1980s
By Pepe Escobar
Feb 6, '14

~snip~

NSA's wet web dream

In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI "secret" would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency - already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as "no such agency", with double the CIA's annual budget and snooping the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net - that was years before all the hype over the "information highway" - and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades - remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on - AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades).

So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine?

They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command just like Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed "only in the next century" we would be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation, and MIT on another system identifying words spoken by different people, while Intel was developing a special chip for all this.

~snip~

It's as if Wilensky was describing the NSA as it would be 28 years later. Some questions still remain unanswered; for instance, if our race does not fit anymore the society it built, who'd guarantee that its machines are properly engineered? Who'd guarantee that intelligent machines act in our interest?