After three generations of futile efforts to develop reliable defenses against ICBM’s, tracing back to the Nike, Patriot, and Sprint programs of the 1950’s and 60’s and warped by Ronald Reagan’s science fictional “Star Wars” scheme, the Trump administration will today pick up the eternal torch. The chimera of anti-missile weaponry remains the most inexhaustible strategy for channeling hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury into the military and its industrial minions—far, far easier than even an endless war. It is now part of the everyday furniture of American life. Future historians will marvel at this mendacious folly.
With the passage of another Cold War “whiz kid” whose youthful technological prodigy was sacrificed on the altar of nuclear supremacy, historians are left to contemplate why. Harold Brown’s mentor, Edward Teller, epitomized the clinical paranoia that ruled the era, so much so that Teller became unemployable in the government he relentlessly militarized. By contrast, Brown remained acceptable in polite Washington company, perhaps because he lacked the H-bomb father’s vampirish Hungarian accent. (Too, he had an enjoyable sense of humor, as when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 1987 that Sen. Pete Wilson’s views on certain Star Wars issues “may win a Nobel prize–not in physics, but in perverse literature.”) But Brown’s legacy of world-destroying weapons, including the grotesque MX ICBM, is testament to how thoroughly he nonetheless embodied Teller’s mindset. A seemingly immortal relic of the catastrophe that was World War II is the industrial and political constituency that continues to laud America’s myriad Harold Browns as saviors of democracy. But they can and will justify anything, especially any raid on the nation’s treasury, in the name of defense against whatever goes bump in the night. Harold Brown, like so many of his fellow whizzes, should be mourned as a mind wasted on an obsession that was and still is a national disaster.
He was, to boot, a longtime director of the tobacco giants Altria and Philip Morris.
Concerns about harmful applications of artificial intelligence are “very legitimate.” Dangers posed by artificial intelligence are “not one of those things that keeps me up at night.” Guess which words were spoken by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and which by DARPA director Steven Walker. While the tempest-tossed masses may be forgiven for not even knowing what AI is, let alone whether it is good or bad, these two authorities at the top of the technocratic ladder reflect the field’s deepest knowledge base. Right? So Pichai is troubled and Walker is what, me worry? Here in a crystalline nutshell is the battle for the future between civilian and military applications that is one of the strongest story lines in the history of technology, especially for the past century. Hundreds of billions of dollars push the tech from each side. Pichai and Walker ought to start spending occasional weekends together–you know, maybe get to know each other a little, being apparently from different planets.
As the international scientific community adjusts its wig after the shockwave of the world’s first genetically altered babies, one thing is clear: self-regulation of research is always a pipe dream. He Jiankui is neither a “rogue scientist” nor “crazy.” He is not a Dr. Moreau. He carries all the credentials of his profession’s elite. History abundantly shows that once a technology as potent as CRISPR exists, nothing can stop it from being used. Someone, somewhere, will feel an irresistible social need, whether from the exigencies of war that compelled the world’s top physicists to use their new knowledge of nuclear fission to make atomic bombs or from the dire straits of AIDS victims in China that compelled genome editors there to make children resistant to infection. The brave new world stumbles on.
Long ago and far away, in an old collegetown in the land of prestidigital lakes, lived three damsels in a half-timber cottage. They had faces that could launch thousands of ships and the most handsome, strongest young men of the college gladly would have tried that and whatever else might possibly win even a single hour of their fancy. But there were so many fine suitors that it took nothing short of magic to acquire more than the pleasure of an idle afternoon. So one of the young men, an outlier who appeared to foolish eyes as just another schlub with long hair, learned to pluck ping-pong balls and quarters from behind the pretty ears of the loveliest of the three. She was of course charmed by this impossible feat and made him her consort, no matter that he had a suspicious name and no visible past other than something to do with New Jersey. This was perhaps his first great act of wizardry, from which he went on to acclaim around the wide world.
So rest in peace, Ricky. Somehow you knew from the start what it takes to enchant the hard-to-get.
The stratospheric jackpot that poured into the lap of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen transformed him into the kind of American hero that will take generations of historical consideration to bring back down to earth. Part of the zeitgeist that will have to be conjured is the culture of 1970s engineering that placed a technological revolution at the fingertips of some very young outliers. (This was not the first time, of course–the founders of the aviation industry were pretty odd kids. None of them ever achieved jillionaire status, however, partly because the federal government bought the seminal Wright patent during WWI.) The record of who wrote which lines of code during the first days of “home” computer operating systems is too convoluted to repeat here. Suffice it to say that the story of MS-DOS, the three-cherries program that released that mountain of dollars, was not a narrative of springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. That Allen and his co-Midas pursued a deal with International Business Machines is another cultural kink, IBM in those days having a corporate personality that channeled General Motors, God, and the Pentagon. The history of American technology and capitalism is a single thread. One fiber without the other will never explain the Paul Allen’s of our era and their mind-boggling fortunes.
The Congressional Research Service, which is supposed to help members of Congress understand the limitless arcana of American government, has issued an update on the B-21 Raider strategic bomber program. Although billions of dollars continue to pour into the project–one of the Air Force’s top 3 procurement priorities–since CRS’s last look, the research agency has nothing much new to say. Fundamental technical details remain unavailable. The vast program is still being managed through “nontraditional means” via a purposely miniaturized Air Force office. Special Access classification, long criticized as fostering mismanagement, still makes validating the proposed costs impossible. In other words, it’s still trust us, goodfellas as far as Congressional oversight is concerned.
With the release of Christine Blasey Ford’s lie detector test record comes the revelation that proprietary (that is, secret) software developed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, called PolyScore, was used to grade her performance as “No Deception Indicated—Probability of Deception is Less Than .02.” The gaping problem behind this sciencey statement, whether you want to believe her or not, is politely alluded to in a 2003 report from the National Research Council, which found such algorithms to be untethered from the “psychophysiological processes underlying the signals being recorded, except in a heuristic fashion.” That is, the supposed validity of the assumption that measurements made by a polygraph machine, such as skin conductance or breathing rate, can indicate when someone is lying comes from the reported experience of polygraph examiners, not from scientific research–two fundamentally different sources of information. This has always been and always will be the crucial flaw in lie detector tests. Moreover, multiple references are made throughout the NRC study to APL’s refusal to provide data about PolyScore necessary to fully critique it. APL can write complex scoring algorithms until hell freezes over, which the federal government will be happy to fund for at least that length of time, but never escape the a priori error of positing that lying makes everybody sweat, pant, and throb. The Hopkins brand name is golden window dressing for the black-box in Laurel.
Either Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford may be lying, but a polygraph test is tangential at best to the matter. It seems unlikely, given Ford’s scientific literacy, that she could be unaware of the polygraph’s methodological weaknesses. She testified today before the Senate Judiciary Committee that when she was interviewing attorneys, they asked her if she would be willing to take the test. She said she took it “based on the advice of counsel.” She added that she had never taken such a test before, discussed how to take one, or given other people such advice. She said that she was “scared of the test itself.” That she submitted to it on August 7 should not be held against her. Rather, here is prominent evidence of its bizarre ubiquity in Washington political and legal culture.
10/1/18: And a friend at Harvard Law. Everybody does it, so should you.
News reports that Christine Blasey Ford took a polygraph or “lie-detector” test last month in order to bolster the credibility of her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh breathe new life into one of the oldest zombies in American legal and political culture. The belief that polygraph machines can reliably sort deception from truth lives for eternity no matter how many times it is shown to be nonsense. No matter how many times the National Academies or the American Psychological Association explain why polygraphs are hokum, lawyers who ought to know better will advise their clients to get wired up to one of these pseudo-scientific thingamabobs, preferably operated by some retired FBI agent who may or may not know better. Here are a few other such immortal zombie beliefs: Harry Truman ended World War II by nuking Hiroshima, Wernher von Braun aimed at the stars, tax cuts for the rich trickle down to the poor, and Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Evidently so many Americans need these tales so badly that historians might as well pack their shelves and retire to Tuscany. Likewise, psychologists should head permanently for Wellfleet rather than waste any more time explaining why polygraphing is junk science. The polygraph test, a sort of Grand Guignol, “works” only to the extent that it impresses foolish audiences, of which we apparently never run out. That Ford, herself a psychologist, chose to participate in this theater suggests the never-ending persuasive power of the genre in Washington. Good luck to her, in any case.
