Future Imperfect #26: Hyping America’s Supergun
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been following the development of the U.S. military’s first railgun, human swarm intelligence, the global propaganda war, and international digital integration.
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Hyping America’s Supergun
The U.S. Navy continues development of the next big advance in military firepower: the railgun.
The weapon is called a railgun and requires neither gunpowder nor explosive. It is powered by electromagnetic rails that accelerate a hardened projectile to staggering velocity — a battlefield meteorite with the power to one day transform military strategy, say supporters, and keep the U.S. ahead of advancing Russian and Chinese weaponry.
In conventional guns, a bullet begins losing acceleration moments after the gunpowder ignites. The railgun projectile gains more speed as it travels the length of a 32-foot barrel, exiting the muzzle at 4,500 miles an hour, or more than a mile a second.
“This is going to change the way we fight,” said U.S. Navy Adm. Mat Winter, the head of the Office of Naval Research.
Lest you think that this last quote is hyperbole, consider the impact of the technology in context:
The Navy’s current 6-inch guns have a range of 15 miles. The 16-inch guns of mothballed World War II-era battleships could fire a distance of 24 miles and penetrate 30 feet of concrete. In contrast, the railgun has a range of 125 miles, officials said, and five times the impact.
“Anytime you have a projectile screaming in at extremely high speeds — kilometers per second — the sheer kinetic energy of that projectile is awesome,” Mr. Work said. “There are not a lot of things that can stop it.”
But this isn’t the first time that the Navy has talked a big game. The big takeaway for me is that there is no current projection for active implementation beyond the testing phase. As a comparison, think back to a couple years ago with all the talk about the “LAWS” laser array:
The path to laser weapons is littered with dead lasers…despite the present euphoria emanating from the tests conducted by the USS Ponce, caution is warranted. The tests were clearly conducted with a thumb pressed firmly on the scale. Most high power lasers still fail because they cannot get high power and good beam quality at the same time, while being within usable dimensions.
At the end of the day, good beam quality and good SWAP — size, weight and power — still determine the success or failure of a given laser weapon, and we’re just not anywhere near meeting all those requirements simultaneously.
Personally I’m thrilled that the Navy is pursuing these technologies (rather than continuing with traditional ordinance) but don’t be under any illusion that either railguns or lasers will be in the field within the next five years.
Strength in numbers
Have you heard about Unanimous A.I.? It’s the group behind the “hive mind” called UNU, which just did an AMA on Reddit.
Among its claims to fame: Winning the Kentucky Derby Superfecta (540–1 odds) and predicting the Oscars to 76 percent accuracy. It’s not perfect, but it’s not trying to be. In it’s ‘own’ words, “I’m a Swarm Intelligence that links together lots of people into a real-time system — a brain of brains — that consistently outperforms the individuals who make me up.” That much, at least, seems to be true for the most part, and lines up with research on the subject. Here’s more from the FAQ:
In the world of A.I. research, billions are being spent by labs trying to replace human intelligence with something purely digital. While we appreciate the goal of creating a super-intelligence, this scares us. A purely artificial intelligence will have no reason to share our goals and sensibilities or our morals and values. So we asked the question — is there another way to build a super-intelligence that is inherently human.
The answer is yes — by creating an Artificial Swarm Intelligence. We believe this is a safer path to building something smarter than ourselves, for it ensures the resulting intelligence will shares our goals and aspirations, our emotions and empathy, and most importantly our morals and values. Simply put, Unanimous A.I. is building UNU to keep humans in the loop…
Responding in kind
The new war du jour? Propaganda. Countries like Russia and China are conducting an information war against the world, led by state-owned media organizations—Russia Today and Xinhua respectively.
From a deep-dive in the Observer by Ronn Torossian:
Take Russia Today (RT.com) — the dominant, 24-hour Russian news network reaching over 700 million people worldwide. As one of the most watched foreign news channels in the United States, RT is remarkably effective at influencing people with its pro-Kremlin coverage in English, Spanish, Arabic, German, French and Russian. Funded by the Russian government, the network is also among the 500 top websites in the world. There’s a reason the Russian government has called it a “core organization of strategic importance to Russia.”
This is Mr. Putin’s news network aimed at a universal audience, designed to look like any other objective news outlet. It features well organized news, insightful opinions, useful perspectives on life and events, even a program by Larry King — the venerable suspender-clad interviewer formerly on CNN. RT brings the Kremlin’s propaganda machine to a familiar venue comfortable with international audiences, offering an approach about Russia not usually seen in the west.
Putin’s use of ‘Russia Today’ to influence hearts and minds by bypassing traditional media outlets demonstrates a keen understanding of today’s landscape — one which the U.S. is missing.
So how can the world respond? Well, for one, there is a bill in Congress for the creation of a Center for Information Analysis and Response to identify, analyze, and refute propaganda pieces on an ongoing basis.
I applaud this effort, but I wonder whether this is fully capturing the scope of the problem. Propaganda doesn’t just take the form of official news articles and broadcasts—China itself faked 488 million social posts last year. Is this Center going to combat that as well? At what point does the U.S. go on the offensive, a la Radio Free Europe, but in the digital space?
Erasing our digital borders
The European Union may make a lot of things easier for residents, but digital integration still leaves something to be desired. Cyrus Farivar recently interviewed Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves for Ars Technica:
When I asked President Ilves how he observes Estonia’s technological, social, and cultural changes from 2006 until now, the first thing he mentioned was the advent of fully digital prescription. Estonia, like nearly every other EU member state, has universal health care. Since 2002, Estonia has issued digital ID cards to all citizens and legal residents. These cards allow access to a “citizen’s portal,” enabling all kinds of government services to exist entirely online: essentially any interaction with the government can be done online, ranging from paying taxes, to voting, to even picking up a prescription.
“In the United States, 5,000 people die a year because of doctor’s bad handwriting,” he said. “It’s very simple. You go to the doctor, and he writes the prescription in the computer, and you go to any pharmacy in the country, and you stick your card in the reader, and you identify yourself, and you get your prescription.”
But international transactions remain significantly more difficult than inter-state transactions in the United States.
“Take iTunes,” President Ilves continued. “iTunes are based on credit cards. Credit cards are national. I cannot buy an iTunes record for my wife who has a Latvian credit card. I cannot buy her an iTunes record because I have an Estonian iTunes. This is true of virtually everything that is connected to digital services. And certainly this is why Estonia is at the forefront of the European Digital Single Market. As I like to say, it’s easier to ship a bottle of Portuguese wine from southern Portugal in the Algarve and sell it in northern Lapland, than it is for me to buy an iTunes record across the Estonian-Latvian border.”
While President Ilves looks forward to erasing borders for digital services, he does want to use the power of national sovereignty to become the issuing authority of someone’s identity online. “A secure identity is the sine qua non for any kind of process for technology in general,” he added. “The new role in this age is the state as the guarantor of your identity.”
To be continued…
I’m loving the first edition of this serial short story from David Somerville, Anonymia. Identity, old debts, technology, art, ambition, and murder. What else do you really need? Well how about a fascinating backstory that includes a theoretical manifestation of post-national sovereignty?
The present faded back into reality as she exhaled another cloud of smoke. “And,” she said, as the fumes curled around the frame of a large abstract painting on the wall. “And,” she said, as I realized I had no idea how long I had been in her apartment. “And,” she said, “I was wrong. Turns out there is a jurisdiction where murder is sanctioned. Our sergeant ran his ID, called a few numbers, yelled into the phone for an hour… Then opened the door to let Tyler Carson Murray walk away a free man.”
“But,” I started to protest.
She held up her thick, tobacco-stained finger. “Trust me,” she says, “whatever objection you’re about to raise, I’ve raised it. Repeatedly. Over the next two decades I ruined my career trying to bring that sumbitch Tyler Carson Murray to justice. But the answer always came back the same. He’s an OSNA man. So was the victim. They’re a separate nation now. Got as much jurisdiction over them as we do a murder in Japan. You wanna solve a Japanese murder, Willa? OSNA says it was a national security affair. Says the shooting was government sanctioned. Says anything else about the whole situation is classified and we don’t have a ‘need to know.’” She spat these last words with particular vitriol.
I’m definitely keeping an eye out for part two!
GIF of the Week: Coming back down to Earth
Weather Forecast: Partly cloudy with a 21 percent chance of Brexit
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