philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

What AI Can and Cannot Do for the Intelligence Community

...modern AI can achieve extraordinary performance on what might be called “thinking fast” tasks but not on “thinking slow” tasks, to trade on the memorable terminology of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. “Thinking fast” tasks, for this essay, refer to tasks that involve a human or machine quickly and intuitively associating an input with an output, like spotting and recognizing planes. “Thinking slow” tasks are deliberate and do not require matching an input with an output, like determining the wisdom of purchasing a particular satellite.

A quintessential thinking-fast task is object detection in imagery intelligence. A human analyst can visually scan images for objects, such as planes or buildings. Deep learning computer vision techniques, including object detection within geospatial imagery, can also scan images for objects, aiding and indeed accelerating the processing of raw intelligence data. The body of geospatial machine learning research produced by the SpaceNet collaboration and the Defense Innovation Unit’s xView challenges makes this abundantly clear.

Other think-fast tasks related to collection, processing, and analysis may benefit from machine learning such as speech-to-text transcription, including identifying human speech in noisy environments and cross-language translation. Collection efforts can also take advantage of machine learning on “edge devices,” computer-speak for low-power, low-bandwidth devices operating in remote locations.

What can’t AI do for the IC?

Modern deep learning isn’t very good at deliberative thinking. It just doesn’t think slow, at least not yet. This deficiency means that those steps of the intelligence cycle that most require abstract deliberation—planning, communicating, and evaluating—will present serious machine learning difficulties.

See the full story here; https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/01/what-ai-can-and-cannot-do-intelligence-community/171195/