Inside the Plan to Teach Robots the Laws of War
The talking heads were the kind of gimmick DARPA would have loved—predictive, creepy, imaginary—but when the agency was founded in 1958, in a panicked attempt to get the Americans into space after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, the idea of outsourcing thinking and decision-making to a nonhuman actor was just as fantastical as when Bacon (allegedly) possessed a brazen head in the thirteenth century. Yet as DARPA became the Defense Department’s moon shot agency, that soon changed. DARPA created the internet, stealth technology, and GPS, and funded research into the efficacy of psychic abilities and the feasibility of using houseplants as spies. As the occult fell out of fashion and technology improved, the agency turned to big data for its predictive needs. One group it worked with was the Synergy Strike Force, led by American civilians who, in 2009, began working out of the Taj Mahal Guest House, a tiki bar in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. United by a love of Burning Man and hacktivism, they were on the country’s border with Pakistan to spread the gospel of open-source data, solar power, and the liberatory potential of the internet. Soon after setting up shop, the group hung a sign in the Taj that read, IF YOU SUPPLY DATA, YOU WILL GET BEER. The data’s offtakers were conveniently elided—they were turning over the information they collected to DARPA, which ultimately used it to predict patterns of insurgency.
The Synergy Strike Force was short-lived: After its Afghani bar manager was shot in the chest in a drive-by attack, the group fled back West. But its legacy lives on in today’s artificial intelligence boom, where the increasingly grim requirements of global empire loom behind techno-utopian promises. Depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence is either little more than a parlor trick, a precursor to fully automated luxury communism, a weapon of mass destruction, a giant energy suck, or all of the above.
Today, DARPA operates primarily as a grant-making organization. Its core team is fairly small, employing roughly 100 program managers at any given time and operating out of an office on a quiet street in Arlington, Virginia, across from an ice-skating rink. One of DARPA’s former directors estimated that 85 to 90 percent of its projects fail.
