Army of None

by Paul Scharre

  First, high-reliability organizations can achieve low accident rates by constantly refining their operations and learning from near-miss incidents. This is only possible if they can accumulate extensive experience in their operating environment. For example, when Aegis first arrives to an area, the ship operates for some time with its radar on and doctrine enabled, but the weapons deactivated, so sailors can see how the doctrine responds to the unique peculiarities of that specific operating environment. Similarly, FAA air traffic control, nuclear power plants, and aircraft carriers are systems people operate day in and day out, accumulating large amounts of operational experience. This daily experience in real-world conditions allows them to refine safe operations.

  When extreme events occur outside the norm, safety can be compromised. Users are not able to anticipate all of the possible interactions that may occur under atypical conditions. The 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan that led to the Fukushima-Daiichi meltdown is one such example. If 9.0 magnitude earthquakes causing forty-foot-high tsunamis were a regular occurrence, nuclear power plant operators would have quickly learned to anticipate the common-mode failure that knocked out primary and backup power. They would have built higher floodwalls and elevated the backup diesel generators off the ground. It is difficult, however, to anticipate the specific failures that might occur during atypical events.

  War is an atypical condition. Militaries prepare for war, but the usual day-to-day experience of militaries is peacetime. Militaries attempt to prepare for the rigors of war through training, but no amount of training can replicate the violence and chaos of actual combat. This makes it very difficult for militaries to accurately predict the behavior of autonomous systems in war. Even for Aegis, activating the doctrine with the weapons disabled allows the operators to understand only how the doctrine will interact with a peacetime operating environment. A wartime operating environment will inevitably be different and raise novel challenges. The USS Vincennes accident highlights this problem. The Vincennes crew faced a set of conditions that were different from peacetime—military and commercial aircraft operating in close proximity from the same air base coupled with an ongoing hostile engagement from Iranian boats firing at the Vincennes. Had they routinely faced these challenges, they might have been able to come up with protocols to avoid an accident, such as staying off the path of civilian airliners. However, their day-to-day operations did not prepare them—and could not have prepared them—for the complexities that combat would bring. Hawley remarked, “You can go through all of the kinds of training that you think you should do . . . what nails you is the unexpected and the surprises.”

  Another important difference between peacetime high-reliability organizations and war is the presence of adversarial actors. Safe operation of complex systems is difficult because bureaucratic actors have other interests that can sometimes compete with safety—profit, prestige, etc. However, none of the actors are generally hostile to safety. The risk is that people take shortcuts, not actively sabotage safe operations. War is different. War is an inherently adversarial environment in which there are actors attempting to undermine, exploit, or subvert systems. Militaries prepare their troops for this environment not by trying to train their troops for every possible enemy action, but rather by inculcating a culture of resiliency, decisiveness, and autonomous execution of orders. Warfighters must adapt on the fly and come up with novel solutions to respond to enemy actions. This is an area in which humans excel, but machines perform poorly. The brittleness of automation is a major weakness when it comes to responding to adversary innovation. Once an adversary finds a vulnerability in an autonomous system, he or she is free to exploit it until a human realizes the vulnerability and either fixes the system or adapts its use. The system itself cannot adapt. The predictability that a human user finds desirable in automation can be a vulnerability in an adversarial environment.

  Finally, the key ingredient in high-reliability organizations that makes them reliable is people, who by definition are not present in the actual execution of operations by a fully autonomous weapon. People are what makes high-reliability organizations reliable. Automation can play a role for “planned actions,” as William Kennedy explained, but humans are required to make the system flexible, so that operations are resilient in the face of atypical events. Humans put slack in a system’s operations, reducing the tight coupling between components and allowing for judgment to play a role in operations. In fully autonomous systems, humans are present during the design and testing of a system and humans put the system into operation, but humans are not present during actual operations. They cannot intervene if something goes wrong. The organization that enables high reliability is not available—the machine is on its own, at least for some period of time. Safety under these conditions requires something more than high-reliability organizations. It requires high-reliability fully autonomous complex machines, and there is no precedent for such systems. This would require a vastly different kind of machine from Aegis, one that was exceptionally predictable to the user but not to the enemy, and with a fault-tolerant design that defaulted to safe operations in the event of failures.

  Given the state of technology today, no one knows how to build a complex system that is 100 percent fail-safe. It is tempting to think that future systems will change this dynamic. The promise of “smarter” machines is seductive: they will be more advanced, more intelligent, and therefore able to account for more variables and avoid failures. To a certain extent, this is true. A more sophisticated early warning system that understood U.S. nuclear doctrine might have been able to apply something similar to Petrov’s judgment, determining that the attack was likely false. A more advanced version of the Patriot might have been able to take into account the IFF problems or electromagnetic interference and withhold firing on potentially ambiguous targets.

  But smarter machines couldn’t avoid accidents entirely. New features increase complexity, a double-edged sword. More complex machines may be more capable, but harder for users to understand and predict their behavior, particularly in novel situations. For rule-based systems, deciphering the intricate web of relationships between the various rules that govern a system’s behavior and all possible interactions it might have with its environment quickly becomes impossible. Adding more rules can make a system smarter by allowing it to account for more scenarios, but the increased complexity of its internal logic makes it even more opaque to the user.

  Learning systems would appear to sidestep this problem. They don’t rely on rules. Rather, the system is fed data and then learns the correct answer through experience over time. Some of the most innovative advances in AI are in learning systems, such as deep neural networks. Militaries will want to use learning systems to solve difficult problems, and indeed programs such as DARPA’s TRACE already aim to do so. Testing these systems is even more challenging, however. Incomprehensibility is a problem in complex systems, but it is far worse in systems that learn on their own.

  11

  BLACK BOX

  THE WEIRD, ALIEN WORLD OF DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS

  Learning machines that don’t follow a set of programmed rules, but rather learn from data, are effectively a “black box” to designers. Computer programmers can look at the network’s output and see whether it is right or wrong, but understanding why the system came to a certain conclusion—and, more importantly, predicting its failures in advance—can be quite challenging. Bob Work specifically called out this problem when I met with him. “How do you do test and evaluation of learning systems?” he asked. He didn’t have an answer; it is a difficult problem.

  The problem of verifying the behavior of learning systems is starkly illustrated by the vulnerability of the current class of visual object recognition AIs to “adversarial images.” Deep neural networks have proven to be an extremely powerful tool for object recognition, performing as well or better than humans in standard benchmark tests. However, researchers have also discovered that, at leas
t with current techniques, they have strange and bizarre vulnerabilities that humans lack.

  Adversarial images are pictures that exploit deep neural networks’ vulnerabilities to trick them into confidently identifying false images. Adversarial images (usually created by researchers intentionally) come in two forms: one looks like abstract wavy lines and shapes and the other looks to the human eye like meaningless static. Neural networks nevertheless identify these nonsense images as concrete objects, such as a starfish, cheetah, or peacock, with greater than 99 percent confidence. The problem isn’t that the networks get some objects wrong. The problem is that the way in which the deep neural nets get the objects wrong is bizarre and counterintuitive to humans. The networks falsely identify objects from meaningless static or abstract shapes in ways that humans never would. This makes it difficult for humans to accurately predict the circumstances in which the neural net might fail. Because the network behaves in a way that seems totally alien, it is very difficult for humans to come up with an accurate mental model of the network’s internal logic to predict its behavior. Within the black box of the neural net lies a counterintuitive and unexpected form of brittleness, one that is surprising even to the network’s designers. This is not a weakness of only one specific network. This vulnerability appears to be replicated across most deep neural networks currently used for object recognition. In fact, one doesn’t even need to know the specific internal structure of the network in order to fool it.

  High-Confidence “Fooling Images” A state-of-the-art image recognition neural network identified these images, which are unrecognizable to humans, as familiar objects with a greater than 99.6 percent certainty. Researchers evolved the images using two different techniques: evolving individual pixels for the top eight images and evolving the image as a whole for the bottom eight images.

  To better understand this phenomenon, I spoke with Jeff Clune, an AI researcher at the University of Wyoming who was part of the research team that discovered these vulnerabilities. Clune described their discovery as a “textbook case of scientific serendipity.” They were attempting to design a “creative artificial intelligence that could endlessly innovate.” To do this, they took an existing deep neural network that was trained on image recognition and had it evolve new images that were abstractions of the image classes it knew. For example, if it had been trained to recognize baseballs, then they had the neural net evolve a new image that captured the essence of “baseball.” They envisioned this creative AI as a form of artist and expected the result would be unique computer images that were nevertheless recognizable to humans. Instead, the images they got were “completely unrecognizable garbage,” Clune said. What was even more surprising, however, was that other deep neural nets agreed with theirs and identified the seemingly garbage images as actual objects. Clune described this discovery as stumbling across a “huge, weird, alien world of imagery” that AIs all agree on.

  This vulnerability of deep neural nets to adversarial images is a major problem. In the near term, it casts doubt on the wisdom of using the current class of visual object recognition AIs for military applications—or for that matter any high-risk applications in adversarial environments. Deliberately feeding a machine false data to manipulate its behavior is known as a spoofing attack, and the current state-of-the-art image classifiers have a known weakness to spoofing attacks that can be exploited by adversaries. Even worse, the adversarial images can be surreptitiously embedded into normal images in a way that is undetectable by humans. This makes it a “hidden exploit,” and Clune explained that this could allow an adversary to trick the AI in a way that was invisible to the human. For example, someone could embed an image into the mottled gray of an athletic shirt, tricking an AI security camera into believing the person wearing the shirt was authorized entry, and human security guards wouldn’t even be able to tell a fooling image being used.

  Hidden Spoofing Attacks Inside Images The images on the right and left columns look identical to humans, but are perceived very differently by neural networks. The left column shows the unaltered image, which is correctly identified by the neural network. The middle column shows, at 10x amplification, the difference between the images on the right and left. The right column shows the manipulated images, which contain a hidden spoofing attack that is not noticeable by humans. Due to the subtle manipulation of the image, the neural network identified all of the objects in the right column as “ostrich.”

  Researchers are only beginning to understand why the current class of deep neural networks is susceptible to this type of manipulation. It appears to stem from fundamental properties of their internal structures. The semitechnical explanation is that while deep neural networks are highly nonlinear at the macro level, they actually use linear methods to interpret data at the micro level. What does that mean? Imagine a field of gray dots separated into two clusters, with mostly light gray dots on the right and darker gray dots on the left, but with some overlap in the middle. Now imagine the neural net is trained on this data and asked to predict whether, given the position of a new dot, it is likely to be light or dark gray. Based on current methods, the AI will draw a line between the light and dark gray clusters. The AI would then predict that new dots on the left side of the line are likely to be darker and new dots on the right side of the line are likely to be lighter, acknowledging that there is some overlap and there will be an occasional light gray dot on the left or dark gray on the right. Now imagine that you asked it to predict where the darkest possible dot would be. Since the further one moves to the left the more likely the dot is to be dark gray, the AI would put it “infinitely far to the left,” Clune explained. This is the case even though the AI has zero information about any dots that far away. Even worse, because the dot is so far to the left, the AI would be very confident in its prediction that the dot would be dark. This is because at the micro level, the AI has a very simple, linear representation of the data. All it knows is that the further one moves left, the more likely the dot is to be dark.

  The “fooling images,” as Clune calls them, exploit this vulnerability. He explained that, “real-world images are a very, very small, rare subset of all possible images.” On real-world images, the AIs do fairly well. This hack exploits their weakness on the extremes, however, in the space of all possible images, which is virtually infinite.

  Because this vulnerability stems from the basic structure of the neural net, it is present in essentially every deep neural network commonly in use today, regardless of its specific design. It applies to visual object recognition neural nets but also to those used for speech recognition or other data analysis. This exploit has been demonstrated with song-interpreting AIs, for example. Researchers fed specially evolved noise into the AI, which sounds like nonsense to humans, but which the AI confidently interpreted as music.

  In some settings, the consequences of this vulnerability could be severe. Clune gave a hypothetical example of a stock-trading neural net that read the news. News-reading trading bots appear to already be active on the market, evidenced by sharp market moves in response to news events at speeds faster than what is possible by human traders. If these bots used deep neural networks to understand text—a technique that has been demonstrated and is extremely effective—then they would be vulnerable to this form of hacking. Something as simple as a carefully crafted tweet could fool the bots into believing a terrorist attack was under way, for example. A similar incident already occurred in 2013 when the Associated Press Twitter account was hacked and used to send a false tweet reporting explosions at the White House. Stocks rapidly plunged in response. Eventually, the AP confirmed that its account had been hacked and markets recovered, but what makes Clune’s exploit so damaging is that it could be done in a hidden way, without humans even aware that it is occurring.

  Evolving Fooling Images “Fooling images” are created by evolving novel images that are far from the decision boundary of the neural network. The “decision boundary” is the li
ne of 50/50 confidence between two classes of images, in this case two shades of dots. The neural network’s confidence in the image’s correct classification increases as the image is further from the decision boundary. At the extremes, however, the image may no longer be recognizable, yet the neural network classifies the image with high confidence.

  You may be wondering, why not just feed these images back into the network and have it learn that these images are false, vaccinating the network against this hack? Clune and others have tried that. It doesn’t work, Clune explained, because the space of all possible images is “virtually infinite.” The neural net learns that specific image is false, but many more fooling images can be evolved. Clune compared it to playing an “infinite game of whack-a-mole” with “an infinite number of holes.” No matter how many fooling images the AI learns to ignore, more can be created.

  In principle, it ought to be possible to design deep neural networks that aren’t vulnerable to this kind of spoofing attack, but Clune said that he hasn’t seen a satisfactory solution yet. Even if one could be discovered, however, Clune said “we should definitely assume” that the new AI has some other “counterintuitive, weird” vulnerability that we simply haven’t discovered yet.

  In 2017, a group of scientific experts called JASON tasked with studying the implications of AI for the Defense Department came to a similar conclusion. After an exhaustive analysis of the current state of the art in AI, they concluded:

  [T]he sheer magnitude, millions or billions of parameters (i.e. weights/biases/etc.), which are learned as part of the training of the net . . . makes it impossible to really understand exactly how the network does what it does. Thus the response of the network to all possible inputs is unknowable.