The CIA's head of technology development says staying ahead of Russia and China is not as tough as getting U.S. leaders to listen to their own artificial intelligence analysis, Defense One reported.
"I just want to go faster than [Russia and China] can keep up," Dawn Meyerriecks, the CIA's deputy director for science and technology, told a National Security Summit in Washington, Defense One reported. "If there's a bear in the woods, you just have to be faster than the slowest person."
The CIA currently has 137 pilot projects directly related to A.I., "experiments" that include everything from automatically tagging objects in video to better predicting future events based on big data and correlational evidence, Defense One reported.
"Can we back into correlations with cause and effect that will allow us to be more predictive with what's about to go down, like the North Koreans are about to launch this or about to do this," she told the summit. "We have that in pockets."
Though U.S. industry — and to some degree, government — have a technological lead in A.I. development, there are real differences in the way the United States and rival nations use it, Defense One reported.
For example, Russia has shown an increased willingness to mix A.I. and guns and lethal ground robots, the outlet reported.
Meyerriecks said the biggest challenge in applying cutting-edge A.I. products and techniques is convincing government leaders, including President Donald Trump, to accept intelligence that comes, at least in part, from a robot.
"We produce a presidential daily brief," she said, Defense One reported. "We have to have really, really good evidence for why we reach the conclusions that we do.
"One of the things that's a challenge for the current A.I. community – one of the things I'm positive will get addressed – is . . . you can't go to leadership and make a recommendation based on a process that no one understands."
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