>> Support for "AI: Unpacking the Black Box" comes from viewers like you and from Goodwill Keystone Area.

It's the last tea party for Krista with Miss Marshmallow and Sarah's first day of management training at Goodwill.

When you donate to Goodwill, you help provide skills, training, and career placement, and the things you loved start a new life, too.

>> Imagine you're a warrior in medieval times.

The rasping of sound of stone on steel fills the air.

So, you sharpen your blade.

Around you, the kingdom prepares for war.

Forges roar to life, their flames licking the sky.

Blacksmiths hammer out swords and armor, while carpenters construct massive siege engines.

The air is thick with anticipation and the acrid smell of hot metal.

Now you march into battle, your heart pounding.

The clash of steel on steel rings out as you engage in hand-to-hand combat.

It's brutal, personal.

You can see the whites of your enemies' eyes and feel their breath on your face.

And then it all goes dark.

Now you're reborn to the chaos of World War II.

The second industrial Revolution is in full swing -- man and machine, working in harmony to create weapons of unprecedented destructive power.

Factories hum day and night, churning out tanks, planes, and guns.

The assembly line is a testament to human ingenuity and the power it can produce.

You find yourself on a boat approaching the beaches of Normandy.

Fear grips your heart as you huddle with your fellow soldiers.

The sound of gunfire and explosions grow louder.

You storm the beach, bullets whizzing past.

You feel something hit your chest, and all goes dark.

Fast-forward to 2028, to another possibility.

The world is on the brink.

China has moved on Taiwan, Russia advances into Poland, and the Middle East erupts into chaos.

But this time, something is different.

Manufacturing jobs in the West go unfilled, as anti-patriotic sentiment, fueled by leftover resentment from the pandemic, and AI-manipulated social media and rampant consumerism spreads like wildfire.

Military enlistment plummets.

In this new landscape, the battlefield extends beyond physical borders into the realm of information.

Intelligence agencies scramble to separate fact from fiction in a sea of AI-generated disinformation.

Deepfakes of world leaders calling for surrender flood social-media platforms, sowing confusion and panic.

The line between reality and fabrication blurs, making it increasingly difficult for both civilians and military personnel to discern truth from lies.

To fill the gap in manufacturing and combat roles, robots flood both sectors.

As human soldiers become scarce, these same robots begin to construct more of their kind to fight our battles.

Now, the decision-making process shifts from human minds to machine algorithms.

The battlefield transforms at a dizzying pace, becoming an arena where artificial intelligence wages war against each other, their strategy evolving faster than any human commander could even comprehend.

Autonomous drones swarm the skies, their movements coordinated by distributed AI networks.

Robotic ground units advance relentlessly, impervious to fear or fatigue.

In command centers, human operators watch helplessly as AI systems make split-second tactical decisions, all outpacing human cognition.

Meanwhile, intelligence agencies deploy their own AI systems in a desperate attempt to counter the flood of misinformation.

These systems trawl through vast amounts of data, trying to identify patterns and sources of deception.

But as AI-generated content becomes increasingly sophisticated, even these advanced systems struggle to keep pace.

This could be the new face of war and manufacturing, a world where human involvement is increasingly peripheral, where the lines between factory, battlefield, and information warfare all blur.

The questions we face are no longer just about victory or defeat but about the very nature of truth and reality in an age of artificial intelligence.

Welcome to "AI: Unpacking the Black Box."

I'm your host, John McElligott.

Today we dive deep into the rapidly evolving landscape of manufacturing, defense, and information warfare, all in the age of AI.

How do we navigate a world where wars might be fought entirely by machines, and where the truth itself is under attack constantly?

What are the ethical implications of removing human decision-making from matters of life and death?

And how do we ensure that in our race to automate, we don't lose sight of the human cost of conflict and misinformation?

Today's episode, we'll hear from military strategists and intelligence analysts grappling with the implications of AI-driven warfare and disinformation campaigns.

We'll explore the factories of the future, where human workers could be an endangered species.

And we'll delve into the geopolitical consequences of a world where manufacturing power and information control are determined not by the size of a country's workforce but by the sophistication of its AI systems.

We'll also examine the societal impacts of these changes.

How do we maintain national security and social cohesion in a world where patriotism is on the decline, traditional military service is becoming obsolete, and the very concept of truth is under constant assault?

Join us as we unpack these complex issues and more, seeking to understand not just the technology itself but its profound impact on global politics, economics, and the very nature of human conflict and perception.

>> I think it's like any other tool we've built.

It can be used for good or for ill, and often our adversaries will use it in a way that we don't like.

So, you always have to understand that while we can regulate and set up rules for AI in what I call the liberal democracies, there are going to be some countries that don't care what our regulations are.

We also need to build a capability to defend ourselves.

Oddly, AI may become useful to defend ourselves.

For example, when someone has a deepfake, as they get more sophisticated, it may turn out that AI is the best way to determine that in fact it is fake.

So, basically, AI will be both the disease and the cure for the disease.

It's occurred to me that here's an interesting technological combination -- drones and artificial intelligence.

You put drones up.

The drones video everything.

And AI identifies anything that is visible to the drone.

That could be a sniper or somebody with, let's say, a rocket launcher.

And that allows the security personnel to focus in on that as a possible threat.

It would be tough to have human beings doing that because there would be so much information coming in and so much video that it would be very difficult to keep up.

But AI could do that and narrow it down so that a security officer could say, "We've got to take a closer look at this."

We need to have reasonable regulation that doesn't stifle innovation but that again lays some basic guardrails down.

I think that's part of it.

But also we need to build defenses against it for people that we know are not going to care about our regulations, like, for example, the Russians.

And that means both in terms of the intelligence we collect and our defense tools.

They need to be adapted with AI so that we can detect when AI is being weaponized against us.

We just need to make sure we're investing in the good and we want to regulate, but we can't kid ourselves that regulation alone is going to deal with the issue.

>> The intelligence world to begin with operates in what we called a wilderness of mirrors.

That's the lingo that they use in the sense of you don't always know what is 100% true.

You operate oftentimes on a notion of rumors, and you have to sort of develop a mosaic that you're building from little, tiny tidbits of data points.

And I think where the artificial- intelligence realm comes into it is, is that going through and sifting through all those little pieces, you know, determining what is considered to be a more legitimate source than another, what is better information than another, what would be considered true, there is always going to be more data than what the normal human being can even process.

And that is why we do need, more than anything, some sort of data-filtration system, which is what artificial intelligence is designed to do in these cases.

It's still going to require the human touch to it because you have to tell it what to look for.

You know, we send up new spy satellites, right?

We start covering the globe to now see it continuously, rather than always a flyby every, like, 90 minutes or so.

That is more data to process.

And, you know, we are human beings.

We work, roughly speaking, eight-hour shifts, and yet it's still going to collect information for 24 hours.

And it needs someone to process that or something to process that.

So, that's kind of the world that we're living in.

That's what I saw mostly on the defense side of things.

What keeps me up at night more than anything is we're not slowing down to ask if we even should be pursuing this, or the way that we're pursuing it is the right way.

It is just, "Accomplish this and then try and mop up along, you know, once we've done it."

That's a really scary place to be.

I think it really requires having open dialogue.

It's a little bit of a cop-out, in a sense, to say that you need open dialogue with these adversarial nations.

But it is necessary, even if you don't trust them.

We have not had a great track record of, over the past number of years and decades, if you will.

We sort of started having the discussions once we started to be able to destroy entire civilizations with the advent of, you know, the atomic bomb.

But I don't think that we are as advanced philosophically and morally as we are technologically.

I really hope that we can generate the discussion for it and, you know, be better off because of it.

>> Imagine if your job is to read every newspaper in every language every day and watch every television news broadcast in every language every day.

The fear was that in all of that noise that we would miss the signal for the next big catastrophic event, like a 9/11.

One of the jobs of the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency is to track satellite images.

And, for example, you might be interested in how many airplanes are on a runway on any particular day.

And your job is to get up in the morning and look at the new satellite pictures of the same runway you looked at yesterday and the same runway you're going to look at tomorrow and the same 100 runways you're going to look at every day.

We want to replace that manual- intensive, boring labor with an AI that can count airplanes on the runway and do it sufficiently accurately that we can offload that so that you're no longer counting airplanes.

You're thinking about why there's one fewer airplane today than there was yesterday or one more than there was yesterday.

So, you have all of this military equipment all around the world with all these complex maintenance schedules.

And how do you know what's the most important thing and where you should be spending your money and your time?

Well, AI can help you sift through all that data, all the documents that come from all the vendors and contractors, and help you sort out how can we figure out what to do next.

So, those are kind of some of the uses that come immediately to mind when we start thinking about, you know, AI for national security and defense.

>> We're seeing AI become a platform technology that is going to be transformative for national security and helping our policymakers understand what does it mean from a national-security standpoint, and how do we stay ahead of the curve?

The Chinese government is actively preparing for war.

They're racing to integrate AI at every layer of their military to embed AI-enabled robotic dogs that carry machine guns alongside their human soldiers, to having a sort of all-knowing AI capability that allows to do hyper-intelligent battlefield decision-making.

Just last month, Xi Jinping re-ratified his view that under his mandate, China will reunify with Taiwan.

And so, all signs point to the fact that, you know, the big war in the Pacific could be coming.

And they're not just preparing for war against Taiwan.

All of their war games are optimized to train their military in a war scenario against the United States.

And so, it's really, really important context that obviously has rightfully informed our thinking.

It's headed towards super-intelligent militaries that, you know, have a lot of autonomous robots built into them.

And so, on the one hand, you know, it's good news because it means less humans might be dying.

On the other hand, it's potentially concerning because if the cost of war goes down, you might be seeing more willingness by some leaders to actually engage in acts of war.

The nations that are the first to identify and exploit the strategic benefits of new technologies historically are the ones that benefit from shifts in the balance of power.

AI is a race with China, and so our first policy priority in AI should be to win that race.

We should be incredibly optimistic about our chances at winning this race but never complacent.

It's going to be a very close contest because we've never faced an adversary like China.

I'm very bullish on America.

I think we can do it as long as we get our act together.

>> If you think back to pre-9/11, you may remember getting on an airplane with a boarding pass.

It had lots of S's on it -- SSSS?

That meant get screening.

But that was based upon some very simple things, like if you bought your ticket with cash or if you bought a one-way ticket, or if you didn't check luggage.

We thought that those were indicators of risk, and so you would be subject to additional screening.

Today, there will be, for example, inquiries as to whether or not the travel agency that you used is one that has previously been used by terrorists to book travel from Karachi.

There are, for drug dealers, you know, inferences relating to the use of transits through, you know, South and Central American countries.

For fraud detection, it is algorithms that attempt to detect fraud patterns.

The rules that flip that switch are being determined and generated by artificial intelligences that are trained on data of past fraud and use that data to develop new rules.

The best ways to regulate AI, to manage AI, to review AI are to ensure "A," that what AI does is as transparent as possible, "B," to ensure that it is as accountable as possible, so that when it errs, it is corrected, and "C," assure that it never operates without human control, and "D," to assure that that human control is as broadly representative of American values and its diversity as we can make it in whatever context of deploying it is.

>> But I think about using, you know, AI models for our website, where residents can talk to a chatbot and help them get graffiti, you know, taken down somewhere or get a pothole fixed or talk about a vacant building being taken down using ChatGPT and AI models and chatbots on our website, right?

Or can we use AI to predict where we're going to have the most potholes?

And that way we can use predictive analytics around our investments related to road-resurfacing projects and capital improvements in our city.

My public works director, addressing the cabinet several weeks ago, was talking about how public works professionals across the country now are talking about AI and what it means for technology and talent and how AI is enabling predictive analytics to really address some of these infrastructure challenges that our respective cities have.

And so, I think it'll help us improve our bottom line.

It'll help us become more efficient as an enterprise.

And I think it'll allow our employees to be more innovative and entrepreneurial, as well.

Really excited about what we have at the Cleveland Clinic with a Quantum computer with IBM, wholly dedicated to healthcare and healthcare analytics.

And AI is a big output of that.

Just engage and experiment, whether it's writing a best-man speech for a wedding or writing talking points for your next PowerPoint presentation at work or finding a recipe for Thanksgiving dinner.

Just engage with the tool and let your mind be open to what it can mean and the possibilities of it.

>> What could we do to actually build an AI for engineering, and why -- why would we do this?

Well, the answer is, in my original motivation, I looked at the world around and said, "Holy cow, you know?

This is moving so slowly."

I mean, when I was a kid, I thought we would have all these flying cars and commuting to the moon, and it hasn't happened, right?

But part of the reason is that engineering is incredibly slow.

Now, innovation is fast at the very beginning of something, but then it just takes so much effort to build something that's slightly better than -- well, innovation stalls.

And that's basically what we've been seeing over the last 50 or 60 years.

If you build something in traditional engineering, you have to have this entire object in your head because you're drawing it visually.

So, if you don't have this thing in your head, I mean, it's not like you can just start and, you know, sketch and, you know, somehow a car will come out of it.

You have to know how this thing is going to look like.

But now we have a new manufacturing process, metal 3-D printing.

You can build completely crazy things now, but you have to have a completely new design paradigm in order to take advantage of that.

We are now the first ones with the computational AI that pushes these printer manufacturers to say, "No, no, no, this is not enough what you're doing."

It's not like, you know, there's no use for it.

It's just, "Can you print with multiple materials?

Can you print two metals and an insulator?"

Because now I can 3-D-print an electric motor.

We have the ability to set ourselves long-term goals now and work towards it at a speed that has never been there before.

And I think we should use it.

And it's a call to action for every single one of us to actually do this.

That will be groundbreaking because you only need a few people who actually move things at breakneck speed to actually change the world in a profound way.

>> As we close tonight's episode, let's peer into a possible future, where the relentless march of technology has led us to an unexpected destination.

Imagine a world where war, as we know it, has become obsolete, not through diplomacy or mutual understanding, but through the advent of an age of abundance and perfect information.

In this future, machines create other machines in a self-perpetuating cycle of production.

Anything you can imagine, from the mundane to the miraculous, can be manufactured on demand.

Advanced 3-D printers, guided by sophisticated AIs, can produce virtually anything at a local scale.

Need a new kidney?

Print one.

Want to explore Mars?

Print a spacecraft.

But perhaps even more revolutionary is the transformation in the realm of information.

AI systems have become so advanced that they can instantly detect and neutralize any attempt at disinformation.

The concept of fake news is as antiquated as the horse-drawn carriage.

Global-transparency initiatives, powered by AI, have made it nearly impossible for governments or corporations to hide their actions or intentions.

This technology has transformed society at its core.

Traditional economic models based on scarcity have crumbled.

The concept of work as we know it has been redefined.

Conflicts over resources, a driving force behind warfare for millennia, have largely disappeared in many parts of the world.

The fog of war has been lifted by perfect information.

But this utopia comes with a caveat.

The technology is not evenly distributed.

While some regions bask in this new age of plenty and truth, others struggle with outdated systems and limited access to these revolutionary technologies.

This disparity creates new tensions, new forms of conflict that don't resemble traditional warfare but are no less dangerous.

As we stand at this crossroads of human history, we must ask ourselves, how do we ensure that this technology of abundance and truth reaches all corners of the globe?

How do we prevent the creation of a new, technologically driven class system?

Perhaps most importantly, how do we maintain our humanity, our sense of purpose, in a world where machines can provide for our every material need, or the concept of subjective truth has been rendered obsolete?

These are the questions we'll continue to explore on "AI: Unpacking the Black Box."

Until next time, keep questioning, keep innovating.

And remember, the future is not predetermined.

It's shaped by the choices we make today, the truths we choose to believe, and the technologies we decide to embrace.

I'm John McElligott, signing off from "AI: Unpacking the Black Box."

Good night, and may your dreams be as boundless as the potential of human ingenuity, for better or for worse.

>> Support for "AI: Unpacking the Black Box" comes from viewers like you and from Goodwill Keystone Area.

It's the last tea party for Krista with Miss Marshmallow and Sarah's first day of management training at Goodwill.

When you donate to Goodwill, you help provide skills, training, and career placement, and the things you loved start a new life, too.

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