I Missed These Two Afghanistan Scenarios ...

... as published here in the Post. Luckily Global Guerrillas didn't, so thanks to GG creator John Robb.

I'll Take the Ventilator

ALL WOUND UP ABOUT HEALTH-CARE "RATIONING?" YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

Foes of a "public option" frequently raise the specter of "health-care rationing" to frighten those who are nervous about government-run healthcare. The scare-mongers try to create hysteria around the idea that soulless federal bureaucrats would rather gak your grandma than pay for her dentures. (As opposed to insurance-company bureaucrats, who also don't pay for grandma's dentures but allow her to live on, toothless.)

In calmer European or Canadian contexts, "rationing" means that, if five day-long elective surgeries are scheduled for today but only four surgeons, the fifth patient has to wait until tomorrow, or whenever a surgeon becomes available. This can mean waiting for weeks or months, which is harmless enough in non-emergency situations: You still get the surgery done, and life goes on.


However, today's Times features a timely discussion about "rationing" scenarios: In the H1N1 context, who can use the limited number of ventilators and flu shots on hand? In "Worst Case: Choosing Who Survives in a Flu Epidemic," Sheri Fink relates a tough scenario that medical professionals at New York-Presbyterian Hospital had to chew on:

A 32-year-old man with cystic fibrosis is rushed to the hospital with appendicitis in the midst of a worsening pandemic caused by the H1N1 flu virus, which has mutated into a more deadly form. The man is awaiting a lung transplant and brought with him the mechanical ventilator that helps him breathe.

New York’s governor has declared a state of emergency and hospitals are following the state’s pandemic ventilator allocation plan — actual guidelines drafted in 2007 that are now being revisited. The plan aims to direct ventilators to those with the best chances of survival in a severe, 1918-like flu pandemic where tens of thousands develop life-threatening pneumonia.

Because the man’s end-stage lung disease caused by his cystic fibrosis is among a list of medical conditions associated with high mortality, the guidelines would bar the man from using a ventilator in a hospital, even though he is, unlike many with his illness, stable, in good condition, and not close to death. If the hospital admits him, the guidelines call for the machine that keeps him alive to be given to someone else.

Would doctors and nurses follow such rules? Should they?

Fink goes on to quote from several federal and state officials and plans, nicely highlighting both the policy dilemmas and human factors that will come into play if items such as ventilators ever need to be rationed in a flu-related emergency.

For a more detailed discussion of the ethics of triage, see this surprisingly lengthy and thorough Wikipedia article. It covers several nations' triage systems, including military combat and non-combat guidelines. Some triage decision-making systems are dynamic, some relatively static—but all need to be thought about or revisited now, before any hospitals fill up and people start rioting over shots of H1N1 vaccine.

Today's Post also covers the world of H1N1, including:

An odd attempt to explain why Mexico's Isla Mujeres resort area is nearly deserted. The writer blames H1N1 flu fears and the recession, not even hinting at more serious concerns about kidnapping and running gun battles in streets across Mexico until paragraph 12 (of 15).

Ongoing, obsessive coverage (here, here, here, here ...) of local H1N1 vaccination efforts, in the best local-TV-news, ten-things-in-your-medicine-cabinet-that-can-kill-you tradition.

Image Credit.

Forests of Mount Everest

Here's a recent image of the Monongahela National Forest; is it what the Himalayas might look like around 2400 AD?

I just finished reading John Jerome's On Mountains. Jerome, a moderately successful author probably best known for Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures, used to edit Skiing magazine but later in life became a sort of more intimate, New England John McPhee.

In any case, On Mountains* includes a passage about montane plant life and, in a mid-1970s moment where concerns about global warming were hardly well-known, describes an interesting scenario about its consequences:

Disaster fans are fond of pointing out that a rise of only a very few degress in worldwide temperature would melt the ice caps, causing flooding of most of our major seacoast cities. Mountain lovers might take some small comfort from the realization that however disastrous that flooding would be in the short run—removing great quantities of useful land from our inventory—nevertheless, a subsequent development would restore at least some of the damage. A temperature change sufficient to melt the ice caps would also raise the timberline—worldwide—above the heights of the tallest peaks. It would take several hundred years to happen, granted, but the forest would inevitably climb right on up and conquer the same bleak and rocky peaks that the mountain climbers covet so dearly. Better make that several thousand years, to give time for the dawdling millimeter-by-millimeter process of soil building to permit the ascending forest a foothold. That same time scale won't do much for the inundated residents of New York and Tokyo, but compared to most mountain processes, it will happen quickly enough to be almost reassuring.

I'm not sure about how good Jerome's science is here, but it is an intriguing idea that one day you'd have dense forest canopy in zones where most animal life can only exist for a few hours, and where nearly any mountaineer whose last name isn't Viesturs needs bottled oxygen just to remain conscious.

* On Mountains is an excellent introduction to all things montane but, like most Jerome books, long out of print. I got my circa-1978 copy at the Rockville branch of Second Story Books, whose thousands of feet of used books are worth a side trip for anyone who has a few spare hours during a visit to D.C.

Photo credit.

FastForward: Heads-Up Displays, Augmented Reality

First in an occasional series of brief looks at a technology, its present and future, and its expression in science fiction. Today: heads-up displays and augmented reality, two technologies that differ in degree more than in kind. For example:

Today: HUDs for your bike helmet and augmented reality (AR) for your walk around Salzburg.

Tomorrow: Synthetic vision systems that replace reality altogether, such as this one showing pilots a "tunnel in the sky" to where they want to go.

As usual, science fiction got here long before science. Here I'm thinking primarily about the AR in Rainbows End, where high-school kids use wearable computers to navigate through real and imagined spaces. But Wikipedia jogged my memory that Charles Stross's Halting State includes Copspace, a heads-up display for law enforcement. And who could forget Iron Man's in-flight HUD or his armor's simultaneous takedown of a half-dozen or so thugs in 2008's Robert Downey Jr. vehicle?

More ominously, you get HUDs so compelling as to keep the remainder of humanity in their chairs—their entire lives—in WALL-E.

Even though WALL-E is satire, it's not that far; witness my wife and I walking near the Verizon Center last night during rush hour. An oncoming pedestrian was so absorbed in texting that we had to split apart and duck out of her way at the last second. The ped never noticed us. Playing World of Warcraft? Shopping for jeans? Searching for a date? We'll never know.

Jane McGonigal and SuperBetter

Jane McGonigal creates alternate reality games (ARGs), basically MMORPGs that you play in reality rather than on your desktop.

She creates ARGs that operate on a global scale (The Lost Ring) or just around Times Square or downtown San Francisco (CryptoZoo).

And she also is pretty brave.

This past summer a collision with a cabinet door concussed her pretty badly. Post-concussion symptoms included crippling vertigo, blurred vision, mental fogginess, an inability to read, write or jog. The initial onset lasted five weeks until, she thought, "I’m either going to kill myself, or I’m going to turn this into a game."

So she created a superhero ARG, with herself as Buffy the Concussion Slayer while friends and family played Buffy's allies. She assembled a secret identity, missions, a superhero to-do list, "power-ups," and villains in the form of her symptoms. Here, in a nutshell, is why:

In an alternate reality linked to our favorite superhero mythology, we’re more likely to stay optimistic, because we’ll set more reasonable goals and keep better track [of] our progress.

And you know what? It worked.

Read her completely inspiring blog entry, "SuperBetter—or how to turn recovery into a multiplayer experience," complete with YouTube videos explaining the process.

Epidemic as Teacher

THE "GOLDEN SHADOW" AND "DARK WINTER" SCENARIOS BOTH LOOKED AT BIOWARFARE RESPONSE—BUT FROM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES.

Last month I met Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD at the Gov 2.0 conference here in DC. He mentioned a bioterror exercise that InSTEDD and some San Francisco Peninsula agencies had conducted in 2008 called Golden Shadow, which immediately reminded me of 2001's Dark Winter exercise (see Comparison, below).

I asked Eric and his colleague Mary Jane Marcus for the scripts participants had used for the exercise—considering that InSTEDD is fairly modest about Golden Shadow on its Web site—and they were nice enough to oblige.

Golden Shadow examined how newer technologies might help first responders better coordinate their response to a pneumonic-plague attack on a rock concert in San Jose. This exercise was intensely local, as opposed to Dark Winter's National Security Council bunker, all-the-president's-men approach.

Besides InSTEDD, participants included the Menlo Park Fire District, San Mateo County's public health department, three area neighborhoods, a health clinic and a school. Participants went out into the field, knocked on doors to assess the epidemic's progress, distributed "antibiotics," and sent and received both planned and ad hoc messages to an emergency communications center (ECC).

Notably, InSTEDD developed software that let volunteers report from the field via online forms, text messages, GPS-linked photos, and blog entries. "This field information was then portrayed in Google Earth at the Emergency Communications Center, ... the headquarters for first responders. For the first time, firefighters and public health officials could see the crisis in real time as it unfolded in the field." In other words, Golden Shadow emphasized information-sharing from the field and among agencies, and visualizing that information at a central location to enhance decision-makers' situational awareness.

Interestingly, Golden Shadow assumed a great deal of friction—Clausewitz's "fog of war"—from the outset. For instance, all computer-based information was transferred through donated INMARSAT satellite time rather than landline-based Internet, reflecting the possibility that landlines may be unusable during a disaster.

(This assumption helps agencies operate better in disasters, a topic I touched on in the SF Weekly 13 years ago and that Lin Wells and STAR-TIDES have elevated into an art form.)

Golden Shadow also assumed that ordinary people make data-entry errors, run out of antibiotics, wonder what to do with victims' bodies, and get spooked by the epidemic; one participant reads this note during the scenario's second hour: " You develop symptoms—a cough (not bloody) but you are concerned."

In addition, edgy civilians complicate matters by "approaching" volunteers in the field demanding prophylaxis, or take the law into their own hands by confining people they think are sick to their own houses.

These touches are a refreshing change from scenarios that assume you start with your full complement of capabilities—all your day-to-day technology operational, a focused and rested staff, and citizens who act altruistically as well as selfishly.

So how did Golden Shadow go? Given that it explicitly focused on whether certain tools could be used in a disaster-response setting rather than how well they did, and on social as much as technological factors, this exercise generated a lot of useful information:

Pluses
—First responders communicated well among themselves using FRS (walkie-talkies) and SMS (text) messaging, preferring more advanced forms of data communications to report outside their own communities.

—Geo-blogs, micro-geo blogs, and GPS-linked photos helped make field reports more intuitive by correlating data immediately with geographic location.

—People will use what they're most familiar with, meaning old favorites such as walkie-talkies and ham radio got a workout compared with their higher-tech brethren. This implies that more-intense training on technologies such as Google Earth could turn that technology into a real aid to situational awareness.

Minuses
—That said, Google Earth didn't function as well as hoped, primarily because it requires some training to use and participants had difficulty loading different layers of data into it. In addition, Google Earth's latitude/longitude system didn't play well with the fire department's geographic system, which centers on street addresses.

—Volunteers sent much information "upstream" to the ECC, but didn't receive much in return fromITAL the ECC, which was overwhelmed by a data flow purposely designed to have a wide range of relevance.

—Volunteers questioned which modality to use to transmit different types of information; for example, one volunteer used SMS to announce that riots were beginning in her neighborhood when ham radio or a cell-phone voice call might have gotten more attention.

To paraphrase one participant, you can see the an interesting new future peeking out around the edges of this exercise. Hopefully, when more funding can be found (or cash-strapped California resumes its statewide Golden Guardian exercises), we'll see more of this type of scenario used to test both new technologies and old-fashioned interagency cooperation.


Comparison
Dark Winter (2001): Top-down, Andrews Air Force Base, simulated three National Security Council meetings over 14 days of real time. Checked how well federal, state and local governments worked together vs. smallpox attack. Former Sen. Sam Nunn played a U.S. president who, amidst news of rising geopolitical instability, receives word that cases of smallpox have been detected in Oklahoma City, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Produced some rather grim findings.

Golden Shadow (2008): Bottom-up, northern California, simulated operation of first responders and emergency command center over several "days," taking four hours of real time. Checked how well bottom-up reporting worked vs. pneumonic-plague attack. No politicians or celebrities involved; further notable for including the wretched stepchild of Peninsula cities, East Palo Alto, in a marquee exercise. Produced some encouraging prospects for future exercises.

Let Me Count the Futurists

If you were in danger of thinking there was just one type of futurist, AccelerationWatch offers a nice corrective with its list of a dozen major types of futurists here. Pick one social type and one methodological type to create your own. Color me both Predictive and Professional. ...

Job Voyager

For a long-term look at where occupations have been and where they're headed, check out Job Voyager, a riff on the phenomenally useful Name Voyager. Watch 1850-2000 job data in horror as blacksmiths vanish and bookkeepers swarm! Farmers plummet and machinists dwindle while "Professional-Misc" and gardener/groundskeeper take up the slack!

Four Easy Pieces

SELF-ASSEMBLING ROBOTS? TO THWART DETECTION, THE PARTS REALLY MAY BE GREATER THAN THE WHOLE.


While heavy-duty cockpit doors and air marshals have made life more difficult for potential skyjackers, defenses against explosives and criminal passengers remain focused on detecting them when they first enter the air-travel system.

TSA sniffs for explosives and scrutinizes passengers fitting certain profiles; use cash to buy a one-way ticket the same day as your flight and you'll see this system in action first-hand.

In other words, TSA is looking for a nutcase with a suitcase.

While such profiling may indeed screen out lone bombers, past attackers have exhibited much more patience than TSA practice indicates. 9/11-type conspirators might not want to bring a bomb on board at all, knowing that TSA is geared to precisely this type of attack.* With sufficient patience, though, attackers may devise other ways to destroy aircraft in flight, such as by carefully stowing pieces of a specialized, non-explosive device aboard a specific aircraft over time.

Summary: In the next five years, disassembled, metal-poor robots may challenge point-based, explosives-oriented security checks at airports. Assembled aboard an aircraft over days or weeks, such semi-autonomous devices represent an emerging type of slow-motion threat.

Assumptions: Advances in miniaturization and autonomy of small, tool-using robots.

Scenario: United flight 38 was sufficiently full that the blue-eyed terrorist had to stow his carry-on bag beneath the seat in front of him.

But had the Chicago-Los Angeles flight been empty, Blue Eyes would still have stowed his bag there. Doing so allowed him to fiddle with the bag's zippers, in the process extracting a very small robot from his bag and carefully attaching it to the bottom of the seat in front of him.

There, the robot, which could be mistaken for a particularly stylish wine-bottle opener, would sit until an opportunity arose to hook up with three of its mates, which others had clipped beneath the same seat on previous flights.

It had taken awhile to determine which flights a given aircraft would be used for, but al-Qa'ida eventually started tracking a United Airlines MD-11 whose call letters were NMV 4523.** Its agents started buying tickets online and choosing the same seat each time they flew. Al-Qa'ida passengers then found that harmless items attached beneath seats (pens, prescription eyeglass cases, cell phones in clip-on holsters) went unmolested for several weeks, at least if the aircraft was between federally mandated safety inspections.

So Al-Qa'ida graduated to placing more threatening items beneath those seats.

Once United 38 leveled out, Blue Eyes touched a button on his BlackBerry that phoned the cluster of four hidden robots. The hitchhikers signaled back that they had not been detected or tampered with.

Blue Eyes's work on this flight was done, and he sat back to enjoy his new copy of Sports Illustrated.

The four robotic components were programmed to wait until their sound and light sensors indicated that the passenger compartment was probably empty, as when the plane was parked to one side for maintenance. Such a quiet period might not occur for weeks, but then the four would unfold and self-assemble into a single larger unit, then re-fold into an innocuous-looking package beneath the same window seat.

At this point, the robot would go back to sleep until its GPS-based altimeter told it that it was riding at 30,000 feet or more, with a course indicating a lengthy transcontinental flight. It and a second assembled robot—Blue Eyes didn't know about the second team of agents and their efforts to emplace a device—would then awaken and get to work.

The nearby roar of the MD-11's three engines would lessen their chance of being detected. In fact the robots had intentionally been placed toward the MD-11's rear, near the stabilizer-mounted third engine that offered such a wealth of associated controls and fuel lines.

Despite their mostly plastic construction, the robots would have sufficient power to employ small saws or drills—Blue Eyes didn't know which—to cut their way out of the passenger compartment toward the MD-11's fuselage. With such access, they could hunt for pre-programmed targets to sabotage such as hydraulic cables or other controllers.

Since the MD-11 was primarily a long-haul aircraft, al-Qa'ida's planners felt that the robots could work slowly and quietly for hours without being detected.

Optimally, the robots would cause this MD-11 to crash—and Blue Eyes didn't know whether other planes had been targeted for this type of attack. Even if the robots were detected or their attacks failed, experience showed that such an incident would probably ground the U.S. air fleet for weeks. Every inch of every aircraft would have to be re-inspected and security-checkpoint protocols adjusted, causing billions in economic damage to an economy that really couldn't afford the hit.

It was all a matter of being patient.

Technical and Policy Issues: Security checkpoints currently search for banned materials (metals, and explosives and their precursors) and suspicious shapes. How would we design a functioning robot that didn't have sufficient metal or a sufficiently revealing shape to trigger alarms? This shouldn't be terribly difficult; most of the metal would be in the robots' power sources and tools (e.g. drill bits, saws), and self-assembling robots are getting to be old news.

The devices described in the scenario above could be designed to take highly creative actions depending on their circumstances. For example, scientists at both SRI and Carnegie Mellon have developed divergent technologies that let small robots adhere to and climb most types of walls.

Note also that the hugely popular, kid-friendly Lego MindStorms robots already exhibit great diversity and high functionality. It is possible that a crew member detecting a terrorist robot could mistake it for a toy and turn it in to his airline's lost-and-found department rather than the TSA.

References: Minority Report’s tiny walking robots. Lego MindStorms NXT. Science fiction that deals with independent, self-reproducing "von Neumann machines," including “Crabs on the Island” (1958?) by Anatoly Dneprov.

* "Shoe bomber" Richard Reid straddles the lone-nut and organized-attacker categories: equipped and nominally ready, but ultimately too agitated to detonate himself out of the sight of passengers and crew—say, in a lavatory.

** The "United flight 38" above is a fictional composite; for example, no U.S. airline currently flies the MD-11 in passenger service. The MD-11 was included here because its rear-mounted third engine makes it uniquely vulnerable to certain types of problems, as accidents involving its similarly configured predecessor, the DC-10, have demonstrated.

Photo courtesy of and copyright 2004 by the LEGO Group.

Pretext for Tyranny!

Fox News's Katie Cobb manages to gasp out just a dozen words of a "worst case scenario" about swine flu before using the words "martial law." Following hot on law's heels are forced detention, pretext for tyranny, mass graves and, most disturbingly, inflatable mortuaries:

An uncontrollable, deadly virus ravages America, shutting down civilian institutions and triggering martial law. Vaccinations are compulsory, and there are mass quarantines throughout the country.

It's the stuff of Hollywood — but rumors that it could be real are spreading like the flu in the blogosphere, where some people are loudly expressing their fears that the federal government is seriously considering such measures as it maps out a worst-case-scenario response to the swine flu pandemic.

During the bird flu scare of 2005, the Bush administration added novel forms of influenza — including the swine flu — to the official list of "quarantinable communicable diseases," clearing the way for the forced detention of people who exhibit symptoms of the disease.

Now a proposal awaiting Defense Secretary Robert Gates' approval would allow the military to set up regional teams to assist civilian authorities in dealing with the impact of the swine flu pandemic. And some observers see this level of government preparedness as little more than a pretext for tyranny.

"The implications are far reaching," Michel Chossudovsky wrote on the Global Research Web site, which averages 18,000 visitors daily. "The decision points toward the establishment of a police state," he said.

Astonishingly, after Cobb allows adults a brief appearance in her story to admit that using the military is unlikely and that government planners must think in worst-case terms to avoid being unprepared, she ends with a non sequitur that indicates her editor's probably sucking down umbrella drinks on some Caribbean vacation:

So rewrite the script: An uncontrollable, deadly virus ravages the population, triggering martial law to protect a handful of survivors lucky enough to get a vaccination.

Fun with Forecasts

To continue for a moment on the hazards of straight-line projections—atomic power will be too cheap to meter!—see "The Lost History of Alternative Energy in America," which looks back at all those blue-sky predictions about how nuclear/solar/wind/etc. would liberate us from fossil fuels.

And yes, even Amory Lovins gets it wrong sometimes, although at least he had the sense to hedge.

Robert McNamara Dies

Robert S. McNamara, one-time Whiz Kid and secretary of defense for both JFK and LBJ, died this morning here in Washington.

McNamara's relevance to a blog about scenarios is that his obsessiveness about numbers and straight-line projections, so useful to him in relatively predictable environments such as Ford Motor Co., drew him to disaster as SecDef.

McNamara can be seen as the Anti-Scenarist, someone who believed his basic model of the Vietnam War was correct and that better input (more troops and bombing) would assure better output (North Vietnam knuckling under). He seemed unwilling to consider that a World War II model of warfare might not apply to post-colonial Vietnam.

Only later in life did McNamara wrestle with his responsibility for escalating the war, and I can't recommend Errol Morris's The Fog of War enough for its window into McNamara's thinking and repentance.

Joseph Campbell's "Mythos"

It's a truism that looking at the future and even the present means examining the past. Luckily Joseph Campbell's Mythos series examines the storytelling of the past--the creation scenarios so crucial to every culture large or small--in 10 episodes that the Montgomery County Public Library has on DVD. ... Gotta go pop some popcorn.

Behind the Curve

I've had fun thinking Very Advanced Thoughts about military applications of robotic technology, particularly with biomimetic design of individuals and flocking-and-schooling algorithms for groups.

What I've really been thinking are Laughably Behind the Curve Thoughts, though, judging from a set of videos by German robotics developer Festo: penguins of the water and air, rays, and jellyfish.

Incidentally, biomimetic design isn't the exclusive province of German scientists; check out this bit of footage of robot fish schooling at the University of Washington.

Pickets' Charge

IN WHICH UAVs TRICKLE DOWN TO NON-STATE ACTORS, THEN BACK UP TO ROGUE STATES.


Advances in UAV technology among non-state actors—from California farmers to Hezbollah to Silicon Valley writers—imply the tiny unmanned planes will also see greater use by large companies that need cheap ways to peek over the horizon from their operations.

Internationally, commercial shippers and offshore oil rigs are logical users of commercial UAVs. Both types of businesses are capital-intensive and vulnerable to human threats, and the cost of UAV-based surveillance and defense is small relative to the replacement value of company facilities and employees.

It’s not hard to imagine that blue-water freighters and offshore drilling rigs may soon deploy their own pickets—screens of UAVs that extend their hosts’ alertness and increase warning times in trouble-prone waters. Since UAVs are on their way to becoming fully automatic (particularly since they’ve long performed complex tasks such as crossing the Atlantic on their own), it’s reasonable to expect they might also be programmed to work with one another closely.

However, these concepts can also translate to offense, as this next scenario posits.

Assumptions: By 2015, rogue states mimic Western advances in UAVs and robotics.

Scenario: The South Korean Navy P-3 banked slowly over the crippled freighter. At this distance the P-3’s pilot could easily read the name painted in big white letters near the ship’s bow: MV Maersk Global.

The massive container ship appeared much as its crew had warned it would be, and the P-3’s radio operator started relaying his observations back to the plane’s base at Pohang Airport.

Pohang, Recon One Four here. Target ship is in sight below us in calm seas. Hull appears undamaged. No crew on deck and pilothouse is empty. Burn marks, possibly from small explosions, at several points along decks. Pilothouse window appears blown in and there are burn marks on superstructure nearby, over.

The reply came instantly, since many high-ranking officials were monitoring the P-3’s mission.

Recon One Four, Pohang. Acknowledged. Continue.

The pilot swung around for a pass over the ship’s rear as the radioman continued his assessment.

Pohang, Recon One Four. Blast marks around rudder and possible damage. Screws are not turning and ship is adrift, over.

Recon One Four’s pilot mused that the decks were clear and the ship adrift for good reason: Thirty hours ago the crew had barricaded themselves belowdecks to ride out an attack by a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Yesterday morning, the Global’s crew was startled to see about 10 prop-driven UAVs flying around their ship. Since their ship was in international waters east of North Korea, the crew assumed the small planes had somehow strayed from an exercise by Pyongyang.

Still, the Global’s navigator triple-checked their location, confirming that the ship was well away from North Korean territory. In fact, it was on almost exactly the same line from Vladivostok to Pusan that it had traveled a dozen times before, always without incident.

So for the next 10 minutes, the crew treated the buzzing UAVs as an interesting nuisance—until the small aircraft turned out to be armed. Crewmen reported later that the UAVs fired a few small but potent missiles at the deck, causing the sailors to scatter. The UAVs then specifically targeted the ship’s rudder, damaging it so that it was stuck in a shallow left turn.

Once the crew realized they had no defenses and couldn't steer, they’d idled the ship’s engines, locked themselves below, and called for help. They would have happily surrendered to human attackers, but none appeared.

Nearly blind, the crew had no idea whether the UAVs were still present and no taste for finding out, considering that some of them had suffered minor burns and one apparently had some light hearing damage.

In the day or so since then, the Global had drifted westward and now was just about in North Korean waters.

The Maersk company quickly persuaded Danish diplomats to contact the North Korean government, which denied knowledge of any incident and any UAVs. Although multiple countries were ready to blame Pyongyang anyway, none of them had monitored any transmissions to or from the UAVs. The aircraft certainly communicated with each other—they had coordinated an attack—but seemingly not with anyone else.

Yes, it was difficult to blame Pyongyang, which also professed outrage that someone had attacked a peaceful commercial vessel so near its territory. To the world’s great surprise, North Korea told Denmark that it would allow anyone into the North’s waters to aid the Global—South Koreans, Americans, whoever the Danes thought might help.

Unfortunately, the North said, since the rescue might be hazardous—UAVs had attacked a freighter, and who knew where they might strike next? The North had to protect its own coast in case they reappeared!—Pyongyang’s own navy would stand off and observe while other nations aided the Global.

And that was how a South Korean P-3 came to be loitering, unmolested, over a giant, abandoned-looking Danish container ship in North Korean seas.

Recon One Four, Pohang. Global crew ask that you verify no UAVs in the area.

Pohang, Recon One Four, that’s affirmative, no UAVs or other aircraft in target’s area. We are alone, over.

The pilot looked down again moments later to see two Global crewmen peering cautiously from behind a heavy-looking hatch that opened out from the superstructure. They waved, and the pilot waggled the P-3’s wings to acknowledge them.

It was remarkable, the P-3’s pilot thought: Zombie aircraft had created a zombie freighter.


Policy Issues: In one stroke, Pyongyang broadcasts that its technological prowess has jumped and that its coast is off limits, all at minimal cost in manpower or political capital.

Tactical Issues: How do you handle attribution in the above case? What countermeasures can a civilian ship’s crew take to defeat the UAVs? Must commercial ships begin to carry their own UAVs for safety? Are dueling automated UAVs a possibility in the next 10 years?

Technical Issues: In the animal kingdom, swarming, flocking and schooling are governed by simple algorithms that regulate an animal’s speed, course, and distance from its peers and other objects. What algorithms would enable aggressive yet useful swarming by UAVs? Can targets employ countermeasures that disrupt those swarms, fooling them into “believing” they are too close together, too close to a target, or acting too aggressively?

Fictional References: The late Michael Crichton’s Prey, which deals with ludicrously advanced swarming, learning nanobots.

The Warlord and His Carpenters

IN WHICH CHEAP TALENT AND LABOR GIVE A HIGH-TECH ASSAULT FORCE FITS.


Cities, and especially Third World cities, remain problematic for urban warfighters, as they (and readers of Black Hawk Down and similar accounts) understand. The confusion and friction that occur even in natural terrain multiply in densely built urban areas as sight lines shorten, while buildings and tunnels add a third dimension to the hazards that attackers must consider.

First World armies’ technologies let them accurately reconnoiter and map cities before a battle; for example, UAVs can help visually untangle slums and aid ground units. However, in the scenario below, low-tech (if labor-intensive) countermeasures defeat even the best mapping technology.

Assumptions: Small GPS-linked robots are deployed en masse to map Third World slums prior to military action. Somali warlords continue to compete with the weak central government.

Scenario: In 2018, Mogadishu remains a maze of largely unplanned development that features winding streets, low-rise buildings, and large numbers of unemployed men and women.

The city is somewhat wealthier than in previous decades. For one thing, commercial shipping now frequents its port thanks to international suppression of Indian Ocean piracy during the late 2000s.

Mogadishu is still largely lawless, however, which is why four U.S. helicopters now sweep in over the densest part of downtown. They are the vanguard of a team whose mission is to quickly seize Warlord Rashid from his headquarters.

The helicopters simultaneously release what observers at first mistake for gas clouds—perhaps of pesticide. In reality, the “clouds” are composed of thousands of golf-ball sized robots, each weighing mere ounces, that float to the ground beneath tiny paper canopies. Each device is a miniature sensing station equipped with GPS plus a separate radio transmitter, video camera and microphone.

Although they cannot move, these devices quickly orient themselves and begin to observe their surroundings, coordinating with one another and with rear-echelon computers.

From rooftops, streets, courtyards, awnings and even the hoods of cars and beds of trucks, these Advanced Mapping Devices (AMDs) rapidly generate an accurate, continually updated map of downtown Mogadishu and its inhabitants that is accurate to the centimeter, including overlapping video coverage and some capture of nearby voice traffic and background noise.

Minutes later, a second wave of helicopters approaches bearing an assault force that is now highly confident of its ability to navigate Mogadishu and capture Warlord Rashid. The attackers have an informant who places Warlord Rashid inside a known building, and the just-created AMD network knows he hasn’t left there. Teams of soldiers fast-rope from helicopters to the street, ready to race off to their assigned tasks once everyone is on the ground. Thanks to the AMDs, this should be a quick in-and-out; there will be no lengthy Black Hawk Down-style battle today.

But as the first soldiers to hit the ground watch, Mogadishu begins to change.

Its inhabitants have watched three times before as U.S. forces have conducted these fast, robot-mapped raids, and this time they are better-prepared.

First, groups of children converge on the AMD drop zone, racing around and smashing the tiny electronic observers wherever they find them—and continually degrading the AMD network’s overlapping coverage. Older Somalis rapidly start and re-park the cars and trucks whose locations other AMDs have so painstakingly mapped. Women hurriedly take laundry in from some clotheslines and run it out on others, changing and obscuring sight lines. Still other groups climb onto sterile-looking rooftops and cover them with pre-built wooden decks and patio furniture.

More startlingly, whole false walls of buildings swing out on giant hinges from either side of narrow streets, turning thoroughfares into cul-de-sacs. Giant potholes are revealed when large steel plates are dragged to one side.

And on it goes: Windows are rapidly boarded up or unboarded to alter the appearance of apartment buildings, garage doors are rapidly opened and quickly transformed into storefronts, and iron grilles blocking doorways are either opened or closed.

Warlord Rashid’s followers have radically changed Mogadishu’s complexion to confuse and hinder an attacking force, all in a few minutes following the first helicopters’ arrival. Here’s how:

Months ago, Warlord Rashid became interested in camouflaging himself, the better to hide from Western officials who had started blustering about the need to bring him to justice. Shortly thereafter, some of his agents abroad began hiring the best workers for creating short-duration, high-impact illusions: carpenters, engineers and builders from Hollywood and Bollywood, who specialize in building lightweight structures that can be moved or modified on short notice.

At first, Warlord Rashid was able to persuade only the most adventurous of these skilled creatives to travel to Mogadishu and help turn his part of the city into a giant breakaway set. Soon, though, ever-larger groups arrived as word spread among Los Angeles and Mumbai creatives that Warlord Rashid was a good—if somewhat demanding—employer who paid top dollar, honored contracts, and protected those who worked for him while they were in Somalia.*

Entertainment-industry carpenters, painters and set dressers were suddenly in high demand thousands of miles from Hollywood and Mumbai, not least because other clans’ warlords began competing with Warlord Rashid to see how rapidly their part of Mogadishu could be changed during a Western military incursion.

Although the Hollywood/Bollywood types were expensive to keep on hand, their designs and instructions could be realized cheaply through the labor of hundreds of unemployed Somalis eager to earn a few weeks’ pay.

The assaulting troops, watching the cityscape change around them and keep changing, are stymied and quickly lose the surprise and mobility that their plan requires to apprehend Warlord Rashid.

Better yet from the defenders’ point of view, this goal has been accomplished largely without violence—Warlord Rashid long ago sternly instructed those involved in changing the city’s appearance to carry no firearms. This both minimizes the defenders’ casualties and increases their feelings of superiority over the invaders.

The assaulting troops can now choose to destroy or penetrate Mogadishu’s obstacles and camouflage; but doing so risks civilian casualties. Meanwhile, their quarry successfully flees more quickly than the assaulting force can pursue.

Questions: In this scenario, determining how much a place’s appearance can change becomes as important as mapping its streets and landmarks. Is a second mapping pass, in which a second set of robots coordinates with remnants of the first, feasible? Should U.S. forces drop a few decoy robots (or a whole set of fakes) first, to fool Mogadishu defenders into revealing planned modifications, then drop the full load of robots after those modifications are revealed?

Is it now important to monitor the costs of and demand for certain kinds of skilled labor in cities as removed as Mumbai and Los Angeles? Does a sudden tightening of skilled-trades markets in those cities, or spot shortages of lumber, nails and construction tools in East Africa, indicate that Warlord Rashid or his colleagues are up to something?

References: Minority Report’s mobile, eyeball-scanning spider robots (kinda like this minus the legs); the burning tires and barricades of the first Battle of Mogadishu; the kasbah chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark; and the finale of Blazing Saddles, where Sheriff Bart builds an entire fake Western town to fool marauders.

*While some Hollywood contractors shunned work in Somalia for ethical or legal reasons, others figured that working for a glorified bandit such as Warlord Rashid wasn’t that different from designing and building a 1,500-seat theater at a mobbed-up U.S. casino, which would then show Cats twice per night at an average $115 per ticket. Banditry, the contractors reasoned, came in all sorts of guises.

Ian Wilson on Strategic Implementation

The University of North Carolina's Horizon project has an interesting piece by scenarist Ian Wilson titled "From Scenario Thinking to Strategic Action" that's notable for:

a) Its insistence on knowing what type of decision you're trying to arrive at by using scenarios, and

b) Wilson's own quote, from 1975, that "all our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future," which is so obvious yet covert in our everyday lives that it might almost be Zen.

CSI: M4; or, The Magic Bullets

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End posits a near-future San Diego in which a wide range of everyday objects are equipped with wireless Internet access and some kind of sensory apparatus. Thanks to wearable computing gear that interprets this constantly shifting data stream both visually and audibly, citizens can walk around in a real-life Toontown that constantly informs and interacts with them.

But Rainbows End, as fun and insightful as it is, looks only at the civilian side of this very wired future. The scenario below looks at the consequences of equipping military tools to report on their status and surroundings; in this case, bullets and their rifles.

Assumptions: First World militaries produce rifles and bullets that contain simple versions of the “black boxes” found on aircraft.

Scenario: The Round Recovery Team advanced from cover toward what was pretty clearly a dead insurgent.

Its three soldiers listened to the battle’s sounds growing more distant, but it was not their mission to rush toward combat. Instead, they were here to account for several rounds that an Army Specialist named John Smith had discharged during the firefight in this clearing had occurred here some 90 minutes earlier.

The group’s sergeant wielded a small GPS device whose screen featured an arrow that pointed toward the insurgent’s body. Specialist Smith’s rifle had thoughtfully transmitted GPS coordinates for the body’s probable location to the RRT just after Smith pulled the trigger, and now the modified M4 rifle proved as good as its word.

The RRT advanced to within two meters of the body and the sergeant pressed a few buttons on his GPS to see whether a U.S. Army bullet might be somewhere nearby.

Sure enough, one round—lodged somewhere inside the insurgent, from the appearance of the man’s body—woke up and started radioing what it knew. The sergeant’s GPS device immediately began capturing data from the round’s tiny, low-powered “black box.”

The round wasn’t terribly smart, but it didn’t have to be; it simply recorded where it had been and what it had encountered during its brief period of freedom, then served that data in an encrypted burst to any properly credentialed device.

The sergeant quickly scanned a summary of the bullet’s information on his screen.

“Narrative Summary for 5M4-4820576632-06, round 6 of 30 that were loaded into clip 1 of SPC John Smith’s M4 rifle. (Please consult this rifle for a view of my apparent target at the time of firing.)

“I was fired at 1039:04.18 UTC on 4 May 2015 as part of a burst of at least six rounds. I am currently not moving, facing 244 degrees magnetic at a downward angle of 17 degrees from level. External temperature is 90.4 degrees Fahrenheit and decreasing at about 0.5 degrees/minute.

“Note: I am 8 grams lighter than at firing. I broke apart at +0.882 seconds from firing against an object with the density of bone. I was traveling at 842 meters/second until this impact, giving the missing fragment a probable maximum radius from my resting place of 23 meters. Click on more details for full data.”

The sergeant pressed two more buttons on his GPS device to beam the bullet’s data even further behind the lines, where computers would compare it with accounts pouring in from other rounds expended during this battle. That data would then be cross-matched with records from the rifles in Specialist Smith’s platoon and possibly with the tiny gimbals and accelerometers embedded in his BDUs.

Analysts would pore over the resulting mountain of data to determine whether the insurgents might be using new tactics, and how well Smith and his colleagues had reacted in any case.

The data had more ominous uses, of course, at least from the perspective of a soldier who felt military lawyers looking over his shoulder on a daily basis.

For instance, the sergeant thought, that whole business about a burst of six rounds or more—the bullet had no way to know whether other rounds were fired after it—became important if the Hague showed interest a few hours from now. The suits might want to investigate to see whether Smith et al. had used excessive force.

In that case, a different team would come in before sunset, grab the body for autopsy, then swab the whole battlefield for bullet fragments, footprints, DNA and other evidence—a level of investigation that the sergeant thought was excessive, not to mention costly—and develop a second-by-second account of the battle for possible use at trial. It almost never came to that nowadays, but it wasn’t out of the question.


Questions: Monday-morning quarterbacks at the Hague, auditing the record of a small-unit action, may conclude that a soldier could have acted differently so as to remove the need to fire his or her weapon. When weapons use is so thoroughly monitored, does non-total war—in any cases but those of national survival—remain politically feasible?

Soldiers will attempt to spoof this system. Can the bullets be made to “lie” or be “accidentally” microwaved before a mission to prevent their reporting back? In that case, if the rifle and its rounds did not agree on what had happened—or if the round made no report at all—how would the military handle this?*

Cultural References: JFK-assassination conspiracy theories. First-person “shooter” video games in which players have enhanced senses. The film Dark Star, with its sentient (and moody) Exponential Thermostellar Bombs.


*Much further into the future, if the rifle and its bullets were sufficiently smart, they might argue. The bullets might complain that the rifle was a rear-area paper pusher that never really got out into the field. A round’s black box may be sufficiently expensive that it is reused after being recovered, and remember previous times that it was fired—and that the rifle couldn’t get its story straight then, either.

David Brin's Remarks

Just after I posted "The Opaque Society, Part 2" last Thursday, I dropped David Brin a quick note saying that I was referring to his work. He was nice enough to write back on Friday with an expansion on his thinking and a correction or two to mine. Here's what he wrote:

PK said: “Brin proposed (briefly) that a) governmental and private surveillance technology was eroding citizens’ privacy, and b) one possible cure was to have truly ubiquitous surveillance, including publicly accessible cameras that watched the watchers. Brin wrote that this regime of many-to-many surveillance would tend to counter abuses of the surveillance system by those in power.”

This characterization of my position is better that some of the capsule summaries I’ve seen. Though almost any capsule becomes a caricature, in regards an issue this complex. In essence, I am not urging ubiquitous anything, but rather, continuing fealty to the fundamental bargain of the Enlightenment. Which is this: since no men or elites or groups can be trusted with power, let us arrange things so that men, women, citizens can hold each other reciprocally accountable. That's it. The core.

Reciprocal accountability is the central driver of democracy, markets, science and justice -- the four great “accountability arenas” of our civilization. And these arenas either thrive or fail in direct proportion to the degree that participants know enough to practice economic, political, scientific or legal accountability effectively.

(For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit." or at: http://www.davidbrin.com/disputationarticle1.html)

In The Transparent Society I do not argue for ubiquitous surveillance, nor an end to privacy (human beings need some). Accountability arenas have been proved to be robust enough to operate with a little slack and even some asymmetries. What I do argue is that we must constantly remember THAT reciprocality is the core element. And that widely open information flows and open knowledge are what makes it possible.

“But what if you posit a sudden sharp increase in governmental surveillance, one that the great majority of the population favors, with no countervailing increase in citizen surveillance of the authorities?”

This is, indeed a concern. But the Enlightenment and our Constitution provide an answer. Break up centers of power so that they are not monolithic. So they are mutually suspicious. So that whistle blowers are rewarded. So that non-governmental agencies have some ability to aggregate the citizens’ individual rights to “look-back.”

What you are describing is the “ratcheting effect” that I discuss in The Transparent Society - wherein government powers to see & surveil keep increasing, each time there is a crisis... and those powers are not given back, when the crisis eases. (See page 206 of The Transparent Society for a chilling paragraph in which I ask “what if the trade center towers ever go down? What will the Atty General ask for?” And I go on to predict the Patriot Act. Seriously! See p206.)

That is why I object to the WAY the ACLU and other freedom defenders oppose the Patriot Act. They aim all their ire at new wiretapping rules etc. But the very idea of restricting govt’s ability to see is absurd. All efforts should instead go toward ensuring reciprocality. Making certain that govt cannot USE such power against us, because somebody is always watching them.

See one example suggested at:
http://www.davidbrin.com/suggestion07.htm
There are countless other ways to break up centers of power and ensure that - even if they can see nearly everything, in an effort to stymie crime, they cannot use that power to hurt people, in general.

As for face coverings, I expect such endeavors to occur. They will be countered by other bio-tracking methods that measure walking gait, hand bone ratios, even scent. I portray such tracking games in my novel KILN PEOPLE. It won’t work much. Anyway, I’d be a fool to depend on it working. It’s like the cryptography fetishism of the 1990s. A silly distraction from the key need and goal.

You will never blind elites. But history shows that you can (with difficulty) make them walk naked.

(feel free to post this response.)

With cordial regards,

David Brin
http://www.davidbrin.com

The Opaque Society, Part 2

Yesterday’s CounterStory looked at the implications for civilian policymakers of the mass use of automated surveillance cameras to sift through images of people’s movements in search of suspicious patterns. Today I’ll examine a few of the military implications of the same technology.--PK

Military Scenario: Even as civilian courts debate privacy issues in the years 2012-2013, automated mass identification is old news for the U.S. military, whose application of this technology is significantly ahead of civilian programs. In fact, U.S. forces can now target specific soldiers and officers in opposing armies by combining UAV footage, data-mining of enemy nations' records, and social-networking software that reverse-engineers soldiers’ movements and communications to create a remarkably accurate picture of an army’s order of battle.

While this is an unprecedented jump in precision targeting, it has one important side effect: Every military shot fired can now be seen as an assassination. Unless a target is an imminent threat—he is firing or readying a weapon to fire, or directing others to do the same—knowing the target's identity and rank makes it difficult to justify killing him and not his commander.

By 2020, this phenomenon has caused rules of engagement to tighten until few people besides heads of state and senior military commanders are legitimate targets of war. Anyone else who is not actually holding a weapon or directing fire is off limits.

Perversely, just as the U.S. military circa 2009 avoided providing “body counts,” it now avoids specifying the identity or reasons for killing any specific opponent. This makes it difficult to trumpet the “good” news of eliminating a particular enemy leader.

Question: Is the law of armed conflict (LOAC) equipped, and is the U.S. military ready, to handle the phenomenon of large-scale but targeted killings?

Reference: P.W. Singer’s Wired for War

The Opaque Society, Part 1

Besides a certain debt to P.W. Singer’s Wired for War, the scenario below reflects my reading of David Brin’s ideas about the Transparent Society during the 1990s.

Brin proposed (briefly) that a) governmental and private surveillance technology was eroding citizens’ privacy, and b) one possible cure was to have truly ubiquitous surveillance, including publicly accessible cameras that watched the watchers. Brin wrote that this regime of many-to-many surveillance would tend to counter abuses of the surveillance system by those in power.

But what if you posit a sudden sharp increase in governmental surveillance, one that the great majority of the population favors, with no countervailing increase in citizen surveillance of the authorities? The scenario below features a single technology—automated scanning of surveillance-camera footage—that generates two distinct sets of problems for civilian and military policymakers to consider.

Assumptions: Surveillance cameras proliferate throughout U.S. cities. Automated facial scanning by these cameras helps officials track criminal suspects, but citizens in urban areas take countermeasures to foil such tracking. Meanwhile, the U.S. military adopts even more robust versions of this technology for use in war.

Civilian Scenario: In October 2012, U.S.-based terrorists stage a Mumbai-style attack, simultaneously barraging a middle school in San Diego; an elementary school in Newark; a shopping mall outside Chicago; and a pedestrian mall in Atlanta with pipe bombs and gunfire. The low-tech, low-budget attacks, designed to influence the approaching presidential election, cause hundreds of casualties and widespread panic.

Afterward, examination of surveillance-camera footage shows the perpetrators carefully surveilling their targets over a period of months; their ringleaders are even seen visiting all four sites.

To avoid missing these types of patterns in the future, both the U.S. government and private corporations dramatically expand the automated scanning of surveillance-camera footage. Computers sift through billions of hours of footage from millions of cameras, looking for suspicious activities or travel by individuals.

For example, thanks to telephoto lenses and powerful processors, computers can now confirm that a man leading his family to different rides at DisneyWorld is the same man who bought cigarettes at a store in Times Square two days earlier—all with no human sifting through the man’s records, or even knowledge of his name.

Although federal officials downplay civil-liberties concerns, this enormous increase in governmental surveillance power provokes a backlash. While Fourth Amendment challenges percolate through skeptical state and federal courts, citizens begin to conceal or even alter their facial appearance while in public.

Facial covering by Muslims is suddenly a side issue as thousands of city dwellers start covering their faces using various materials and configurations that foil visible-light and thermal imaging. Some even use an ever-changing selection of prosthetics to alter the appearance of the face itself.

While they are barred from concealing their appearance within government offices and businesses such as banks, disguise actually becomes hip in less-regulated settings. Some urban areas start to look like Halloween year-round as Klingon makeup, Elvis sideburns and Emperor Palpatine hoods proliferate among an increasing number of secular veils, fedoras and burqas.

The federal government responds by limiting how and how much citizens may conceal, leading to still other privacy-based court challenges. For the time being, however, hoods, veils and burqas become illegal, as do facial prosthetics, elective cosmetic surgeries, and even certain cold-weather clothing such as balaclavas.


Questions: On which side will the courts fall when there is no immediate national-security concern posed by covering one’s face and otherwise changing one’s appearance? Or does the sheer ability of governments and businesses to electronically observe every urban public space lead courts to conclude that civilians face a “reasonable expectation” that they will be observed?


The above is only the civilian side of this scenario. Stay tuned for the military implications of this CounterStory tomorrow.

The (Too-) Smart Bomb

Here’s the first of many near-future-conflict CounterStories. As with most good scenarios, this one is based on only a handful of technological, economic or social changes—but those seemingly small changes quickly add up to a different set of decisions that policy-makers might face. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to let me know what you think.--Paul Kretkowski

Assumptions: By the year 2016, global trade and shipping recover from the 2008–2010 recession, but high-seas piracy worsens as well. Manned offshore patrols remain as costly as ever, but technological advances enable cruise missiles to stay airborne for days rather than hours.

Scenario: The U.S. has deployed long-range, semi-autonomous cruise missiles to patrol international shipping lanes in regions where manned seagoing vessels are spread too thin. With human air-traffic controllers (ATCs) monitoring them, these missiles criss-cross areas around the Strait of Malacca and Gulf of Aden, for example, where piracy is rampant but enforcement vehicles and manpower are scarce.

The missiles loiter around shipping lanes and occasionally “interrogate” ships’ captains by radio to try to determine whether they are pirates. The missiles’ computers use a variety of criteria to rate whether or not a particular vessel is likely a pirate—the captain’s responses, ship’s tonnage, registry, destination and manifest. Human ATCs then decide whether to allow a legitimate-seeming vessel to proceed—or demand that an alleged pirate vessel surrender or be disabled or destroyed by the missile.

Since these cruise missiles are “smart” enough to be semi-autonomous, a single human ATC can monitor and manage several missiles at once, overseeing their day-to-day, largely scripted interrogations of international shipping—the robotic equivalent of today’s police DUI checkpoints.

On the high seas as elsewhere, though, manpower and attention are at a premium.

Off the Kenyan coast, pirates manage to seize a commercial ship and begin running it toward the nearest East African port, diverting Navy eyeballs and resources from monitoring cruise missiles deployed near the Gulf of Aden.

The suddenly busy human ATC uses a new option, that of switching most of his cruise missiles over to a fully automatic “crisis” mode while he focuses his attention elsewhere.

The cruise missiles near the Gulf of Aden continue to aggressively question civilian vessels about their ship and their intentions, just as before. Those ships take the missiles’ intrusiveness seriously because the cruise missile is nearly impossible for civilian vessels to counter, and flits in and out of radar range while it makes up its “mind” about the civilians’ status.

For the first time in history, humans are forced to engage in a sort of Turing-test-in-reverse administered by a machine, and must prove to a computer alone that they are not pirates.


This scenario raises several questions. As a “police” system, the cruise missiles and their ATCs normally err on the side of freeing the guilty rather than punishing the innocent. In “crisis” mode, though, the now-autonomous missiles make life-or-death decisions on their own, and opportunities for mistakes multiply.

What is the structure of checks and balances that might allow the ATC and the cruise missiles to make the right call, both morally and in accordance with maritime law? How would laws relating to piracy have to be modified to allow robotic cruise missiles to use disabling or deadly force without a positive order to do so? Is the trade-off of a more widespread maritime presence worth the potential cost in lives, should a cruise missile make the wrong decision?

For some interesting fiction that discusses machine volition and friend-or-foe problems, see Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker” stories and Keith Laumer’s “Bolo” stories.

Upcoming Scenarios

For the past few weeks I’ve been periodically creating scenarios based on my reading of “Wired for War,” P.W. Singer’s book on the escalating use of robotic devices in warfare.

If the increasingly lethal, increasingly autonomous machines that Singer describes take the field—self-directing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), demining robots, tracked devices armed with rifles or rockets, small submersibles—they’ll change not just combat operations but the risks and opportunities policymakers face.

I chose to illustrate some of these challenges through scenarios, which may let readers quickly grasp how a new technology may cause a certain kind of future where simply describing that technology might not.

For example, today’s UAVs already make many decisions on their own, constantly adjusting their speed, direction, trim and angle of attack to remain airborne, while humans handle executive-level decisions about targeting and weapons use. The scenario I’ll publish in a few days, “The Too-Smart Bomb,” deals with the tactical and strategic consequences of using UAVs that are just slightly smaller and more independent than today’s.

I’m currently working on five other scenarios that deal with a backlash against face-scanning technology, slow robots that replace fast explosions as terrorists’ weapons of choice, high-speed urban mapping by the military, “magic” bullets that audit themselves, and cruise missiles that can interrogate pirates. Stay tuned for these and “The Too-Smart Bomb” in a few days.

NPR: The Future of Pot

For the inaugural post of this scenario-focused blog, I'll just quickly link to NPR's "What If Marijuana Were Legal?" scenario from today, which posits a world two years after the decriminalization of marijuana for personal use.

Even reporter John Barnett admits that this scenario failed to cover the biggest what-if among stoner conspiracy theorists: How will Big Tobacco react (and profit)? But it's a fun listen, particularly if you tune in at the middle of the story, where legalization is presented as a done deal, and having an ounce of marijuana on you creates no more trouble than if you were walking down the street with a sealed fifth of scotch.