From Defense One, March 16:
The Pentagon Wants AI To Reveal Adversaries’ True Intentions
The U.S. military is looking to enlist game theory and artificial intelligence to fight tomorrow’s unconventional warfare tactics.
From eastern Europe to southern Iraq, the U.S. military faces a difficult problem: Adversaries pretending to be something they’re not — think Russia’s “little green men” in Ukraine. But a new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks to apply artificial intelligence to detect and understand how adversaries are using sneaky tactics to create chaos, undermine governments, spread foreign influence and sow discord.
This activity, hostile action that falls short of — but often precedes — violence, is sometimes referred to as gray zone warfare, the ‘zone’ being a sort of liminal state in between peace and war. The actors that work in it are difficult to identify and their aims hard to predict, by design.
“We’re looking at the problem from two perspectives: Trying to determine what the adversary is trying to do, his intent; and once we understand that or have a better understanding of it, then identify how he’s going to carry out his plans — what the timing will be, and what actors will be used,” said DARPA program manager Fotis Barlos.
Dubbed COMPASS, the new program will “leverage advanced artificial intelligence technologies, game theory, and modeling and estimation to both identify stimuli that yield the most information about an adversary’s intentions, and provide decision makers high-fidelity intelligence on how to respond–-with positive and negative tradeoffs for each course of action,” according to a DARPA notice posted Wednesday.
Teaching software to understand and interpret human intention — a task sometimes called “plan recognition” — has been a subject of scholarship since at least a 1978 paper by Rutgers University researchers who sought to understand whether computer programs might be able to anticipate human intentions within rule-based environments like chess.
Since then, the science of plan recognition has advanced as quickly as the spread of computers and the internet, because all three are intimately linked....MORE
