Mind and Iron: AI weapons take a troubling leap forward
And on the non-war front, new AR glasses that could (slightly) shield us from reality. Also, is high-speed rail the climate-change answer?
Hi and welcome back to Mind and Iron. I’m Steve Zeitchik, longstanding staffer at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and proprietor of this here platform.
It’s been a difficult time halfway around the world in the Middle East, which means it’s been a difficult time in these parts too. But we’re continuing our weekly mission to cover the most human-centric aspects of tech, a goal that in a rapidly dehumanizing world seems more important than ever.
A reminder to sign up here if you’re not already on our list.
And please consider pledging a subscription for when we turn on paid posts. Journalism that examines the everyday consequences of all this tech advancement is crucial (we think). And unfortunately it doesn’t come free. But it does come cheaper than many other publications. So for the full complement of content — and to support our tech-humanist cause — just hit the button below.
This week we revisit the story of AI weapons, which in literally the week since we wrote about it last Thursday has taken another step toward battlefield usage.
Also, AR glasses — more fantastical than reality, less obtrusive than VR — are getting another go, after Google Glass a decade ago didn’t exactly set the world afire.
And last month we told you about the bold adventurer in Canada who has embarked on a wild project to create a 600 m.p.h. tube-train. This week we check in with a different figure on the bleeding edge of the travel frontier — Andy Kunz, the president and chief executive of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association. His goal: to bring 200 m.p.h. trains to vast swaths of the country. He has a rather different view on the future of inter-city travel, and you’ll hear him lay out those provocations in our audio interview below.
Our future-world quote of the week comes from him:
“We have all our eggs in the two baskets of the lowest density modes of transportation. It’s pretty primitive compared to how even the French get around.”
—Andy Kunz, head of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association and green-travel advocate, on the need to de-emphasize cars and planes
Let’s get to the messy business of building the future.
IronSupplement
Everything you do — and don’t — need to know in future-world this week
AI weapons may have just killed someone in a war; Microsoft tries to succeed where Google Glass failed; chasing valuable asteroids?
1. WELL THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG.
Last week I wrapped up a post about a grim future filled with “slaughterbots” — aka autonomous weapons — by suggesting how imminent they truly were. “[T]he future of war remains deeply technological; the probability of weapons making in-the-moment kill decisions is increasing daily,” I noted.
I just didn’t think they’d hit 100 percent so soon.
Over the weekend New Scientist reported that an AI weapon that can make decisions all in its own has been active in Ukraine. “Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence are now finding and attacking targets without human assistance,” the publication wrote, “in what would be the first confirmed use of autonomous weapons or ‘killer robots.’”
The drone in question is the Saker Scout, named after the eponymous Saker company. The surprising part is until two years ago the firm wasn’t even making weapons — it was producing drones that can assist with farming. But it pivoted with the Russian invasion in early 2022, developing a model that can recognize armored vehicles through many kinds of camouflage and then fire accordingly.
The drones largely target tanks not people, though a distinction without a difference since tanks tend to have people in them. At least 64 types of military machines can be recognized by the system, even through dense cover, Saker says.
Now, the weapons can be used with human control — in such cases the AI works as a recognition tool and then the human makes the firing decision. But the drone also can be shifted to fully autonomous mode, in which upon recognizing the armored vehicle it decides based on its training data to fire on its own — in which it decides to kill a person with no human input or even knowledge. The thing is just flying around up there, and chooses what to blow up and what to pass by.
Here’s how the company highlights the Scout's abilities on its Web site:
That such a weapon is now being used in the war against Russia shouldn’t come as a surprise — the Ukrainian defense ministry approved it for use in combat six weeks ago.
The significance also isn’t really technological; we’ve long known that full autonomy is pretty easily possible.
The news is that a nation has actually used such a weapon, without any international clearance or, for the moment, appreciable outcry. This is like Neil Armstrong stepping down on the moon, only the horrific version — it’s a giant leap for mankind in the wrong direction. (A strike by a Turkish drone in Libya in 2020 also may have made an autonomous decision, but that remains unconfirmed.)
Our post last week examined the scary consequences of AI weapons at length, so I won’t run through the whole list of what we need to worry about here. (To take just two reasons at random, the problem that the machines can “hallucinate” in ways ChatGPT does, and the possibility of “flash wars,” as AI weapons escalate attacks on other AI weapons before humans can realize what’s happening. Along with the head-spinning fact that machines are making live-or-die decisions about human beings.)
The U.S. military is already going pretty hard on AI weapons. The Air Force, for instance, has been testing autonomous combat aircraft made by a San Diego company and requested nearly $400 million in its 2024 budget to work on applications for them.
Activist groups are no doubt already marshalling their responses on the Ukraine news; I’ve reached out to two, Stop Killer Robots and Human Rights Watch, and will keep you posted on what they say.
It is worth noting that there are experts who believe AI weapons will reduce casualties by eliminating soldiers’ acts of revenge, passion and ineptitude. And there’s some merit to that. But a fraught contention to be sure.
Amid the painful intensity of war in Gaza it can be hard to pay attention to developments elsewhere in the world; perhaps like you, my attention has felt impossibly split in recent days. But ignoring these shifts happens at our peril. Because if AI weapons are being deployed on one battlefield, how soon before they migrate? And then how hard will it be to put the genie back in the bottle? “If Ukraine is using them, then Russia wants to use them, then…”
The humans’ mission just got harder.
2. SPEAKING OF THE MILITARY, MICROSOFT LAST MONTH SEEMED TO HAVE solved the problem of its mixed-reality glasses giving soldiers headaches and nausea spells (slight problem if you’re going into combat).
Those accessories are meant to allow full sight on the battlefield while still providing other screen-based information, and the U.S. Army could spend as much as $22 billion on them.
Ah, but sight beyond sight isn’t just for soldiers, says Microsoft. The firm believes that in the coming years many of us regular civilians will want to wear glasses that combine what we’re looking at in the real world with all kinds of digital overlays — text messages, Web pages, video games, enriched data of all the people and places in our sightline.
Earlier this month the tech giant filed for a patent on a new design of AR glasses, Quartz reports. Several designs were in the application, with many seeking to find better places to put and charge the battery. (Battery issues are one of several hindrances to popularizing AR glasses beyond the bros.)
One hardly needs clairvoyant lenses to foresee other challenges. AR glasses, after all, was something Google struck out with back in 2013. Comfort, functionality, memory capacity and talking to your eyewear all were also concerns for its so-called “Glass” product. Also that whole pesky issue of someone who wears them constantly recording you.
AR glasses, btw, are fundamentally different from VR headsets like Meta’s Quest. Those latter specs are not what you’d walk around using in everyday life. They’re more of a hefty piece of equipment you put on for a fixed immersive experience like a splashy game or piece of entertainment; it’s the difference between a home-stereo system and a Discman, in an analogy that just made me seem 100 years old. Even Apple’s coming Vision Pro, a so-called “mixed-reality” headset that has elements of both, feels bulky.
I should also note that the Microsoft AR patent application comes after it filed a bid for an AI-enabled smart backpack, a cool-sounding idea whose particular utility eludes me, though I guess when the schoolyard bully pushes you down, it’s nice to know that the system will capture all their biometric information.
Anyway, Apple had its own AR-exclusive glasses product that couldn’t seem to get off the ground, so for Microsoft this AR patent application may be more about a competitive arms race than a spanking new use case. Still, a world in which AR glasses slowly start living alongside our smartphones and eventually edge them out as our trusty connected device isn’t hard to imagine — if the tech and form function are user-friendly enough (the perpetual big if).
After all, the world has gotten more distracted and media more layered, and maybe glasses that allow reality to more smoothly integrate with our screens is exactly what we need. Maybe by 2028 we’ll all be walking down the street with lenses over our eyes, the idea of pulling a phone from our pockets as silly to us then as running back home to use a cordless phone is now.
True, some of the AR-glasses hype does seem like the stuff of an ADHD parody — so many distractions abound in our world; do we really need more visual information coming our way? There’s a reason we like being connected via our phones: we can put our phones away.
Not to mention the ad overload; brands will be falling over themselves to pay for those (literal) eyeballs. Plus do you really want to wonder if the person you’re talking to is looking at you or their DraftKings app?
But maybe — and hear out my Kool-Aid jag here — this idea has merit. So much of what makes screens distracting is the need to pull them out. And that need is just an accident of technology.
If I want to know more about the building I’m about to enter or the contact I’m about to meet, what innate value comes from a whole separate action of taking out a device, seeking out a Wikipedia page or Facebook feed, reading said info and then putting that device away? When I can just look at the building or person and get all the information I want that way?
These doodads may make the current gap between screens and reality a little less wide. And given the whiplash we can feel toggling between the two — between actively disconnecting from reality to plug into digitality — bringing them a little closer may not be the worst thing in the world.
3. “JERRY IT’S 3:30 IN THE MORNING AND I’M AT A COCKFIGHT. WHAT AM I CLINGING TO?”
A classic Seinfeld bit, with some unfortunate parallels for the current state of Planet Earth.
But if you’re wondering why we’re indeed clinging to this feather-filled rooster pit of a home, boy, does NASA have a mission for you.
The agency sent a spacecraft last Friday to track down 16 Pscyhe. That name sounds like a plot element from “The Orville,” but 16 Psyche is actually a real-life asteroid believed to be uncommonly filled with more metal than rock or ice. Much scientific information could be available as a result: NASA notes that the “metal-rich asteroid may tell us more about planetary cores and how planets form."
Oh yes, Psyche is two billion miles away, so we should get there by 2029 if we’re lucky. Also, the rock ain’t small: 64,000 square miles.
While millions of asteroids have come to be discovered since the 19th century, Psyche was the 16th ever found, which gives the floating rock an, ahem, early-mover advantage. That’s an illustration of it below, looking like a cross between E.T. and a curmudgeon that really doesn’t want to give away its Halloween candy.
The idea underlying the mission is kind of cool: doing something very futuristic to understand our past. Psyche is the type of asteroid believed to be what’s left of planets that were destroyed in the early stages of the solar system, long before we arrived on the scene to do some destroying of our own. So studying it could tell us a lot about how our own planet was formed.
As NASA puts it, “Scientists think that because of its high metal content [Psyche] may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.” (That metal also may be worth some factor of quadrillions of dollars, so if nothing else NASA will have some new funding options.)
A piece in The Conversation by the Australia-based geophysicist Hrvoje Tkalcic captures the meaning well. “We can think of NASA’s mission to Psyche as a journey to the center of Earth without having to travel down through the planet’s rocky crust, the slowly moving mantle and the liquid core.”
No spots for humans were on offer aboard the spacecraft, but we couldn’t blame someone for trying to stow away. Because with all that coolness out there, and the sad state of affairs right here, what are we clinging to?
[The Conversation, Unilad and NASA]
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score
Every week we bring you the TSAS — the TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC APOCALYPSE SCORE (tm). It’s a barometer of the biggest future-world news of the week, from a sink-to-our-doom -5 or -6 to a life-is-great +5 or +6 the other way.
Here’s how the future looks this week:
AI WEAPONS ARE NOW BEING USED IN UKRAINE: Oh goody. -6
MICROSOFT GOES FROM WINDOWS TO GLASSES: We’re in. +3
A GIANT METAL ROCK IS FLOATING AROUND SOMEWHERE UP THERE AND WE CAN GET TO IT? Sounds kind of appealing tbh. +2.5
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score for this week:
-.5
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score for this year:
-25
IronClad
Conversations with people living the deep side of tech
Will the U.S. ever get high-speed rail?
The future of transportation is an issue of considerable interest to us here at M&I. Our current way of getting around an increasingly clogged planet is bad for the environment and bad for our sanity, and so new methods can — and will — start to proliferate.
Last month we peeked at a wild idea from Sebastien Gendron and his Canadian company TransPod to create a tube train that can zip along at speeds of 600 m.p.h.. The concept will be tested in the next few years, with passengers potentially able to climb aboard by the middle of next decade.
This week we’re taking a look at a more provable form of transit: high-speed rail. This is the system that uses existing track but much-improved tech to allow trains to travel at speeds of 200 m.p.h. or more. China’s already built 25,000 miles of the stuff, nearly all of it in the last 15 years. America has built….pretty much nothing.
HSR may not offer the sleekness of a tube-train. But as a way to move between major hubs — with some stops in suburban outposts along the way — it offers plenty of promise. The privately run “Brightline” train in Florida carried more than a million passengers last year, though technically it’s not high-speed for most of its run.
That said, high-speed rail comes with challenges logistical, political and economic. The California project linking Los Angeles and San Francisco has been a case study in what not to do with future-oriented infrastructure, with the venture facing issues of ballooning costs (from an estimated $33 billion at inception in 2008 to well over $100 billion now) to political, er, hindrances. Even small sections of the route are unlikely to open anytime before the end of the decade.
One man at the center of all this is Andy Kunz, president and chief executive of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association. He’s tasked with coordinating efforts public and private all of the country. Needless to say he feels passionate about the goals — about why cars and planes, for all their entrenched power, need to move over and make room for these train systems.
So we sat down and talked to him about his vision — the appeal, the challenges, all of it — and how we potentially will be moving around the U.S. a lot differently in the 2030’s and 2040’s than we are now.
Since we’re going to start moving in some podcast-y directions ourselves, we thought we’d give you the whole audio of the interview. You can listen to the first half here — just hit the green play button. We’ll be back with Part 2 next week. And for you written-word types out there, don’t worry — you can find a rundown below of some of his best quotes.
—On the folly of continuing down our current path:
“We endlessly build roads and it makes no sense. You can widen another highway and build six more lanes and they just fill up with traffic. And we keep doing it like idiots.”
—On the potential pace of HSR construction:
“If we got our act together we can build at least half as fast as China, and they built 25,000 miles in 15 years.”
—On the environmental urgency:
“We’re in an emergency situation and we need to be putting all hands on deck to rapidly decarbonize our transportation systems. And we have the solutions to do it.”
—On the relative merits of high-speed rail vs self-driving cars:
“They were all claiming that’s the next great thing that’s gonna change your life and revolutionize the world. And where are we today? We’ve wasted ten years with it and gotten nowhere. It was basically a big distraction to actually solving our transportation and climate problems.”
—On why EVs aren’t the answer either:
“We have all our eggs in the two baskets of the lowest density modes of transportation (cars and planes) trying to move a big, powerful high-population nation. It’s pretty primitive compared to how even the French get around.”
—On the objection that America is too sprawling and/or culturally entrenched for this:
“If we made it a priority like how we built roads [in the 20th-century] we’d have an HSR system that looked like China.”
—On hyperloop:
“I mean we already have a fully proven, extremely high-capacity system that’s been worked out for 50 years. It makes no sense to me to ignore that and go off on some sort of a tangent of something that has a zillion things that haven’t been worked out.”
—On why things haven’t changed in the U.S. yet:
“The root of the problem is the people making decisions in this country is the biggest corporations. And the biggest corporations in America are all in transportation — they’re in auto and aviation and oil.
—On why he thinks they could change soon:
“Luckily Brightline came along. So finally there’s a billion-dollar company on our side.”
—On the general muck:
“Here we are in the 21st-century and we’re in primitive transportation systems. Sitting stuck in traffic is pretty primitive for the 21st century.”