Artificial Intelligence Will Put Spies Out of Work Too

Cardillo, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, known by the acronym NGA, announced his push toward "automation" and Artificial Intelligence at a conference this week in San Antonio. The annual conference, hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, brings together technologists, soldiers, and intelligence professionals to discuss national security threats, changes in technology, and data collection and processing. Artificial Intelligence is on the rise; former President Barack Obama's White House released a white paper on its potential future impacts in the final months of the administration. Police officers are using preliminary programs to predict the likelihood someone will commit a crime in a specific neighborhood based on crime statistics data. And companies like Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to calculate what movie you will want to watch or which book you may buy.Yet this sort of automation is also seen as a threat to workers, who fear being put out of jobs, particularly in the private sector.The fear that Artificial Intelligence will take over jobs, or fail catastrophically along the way, is palpable in the intelligence community as well, and Cardillo admitted that the workforce is "skeptical," if not "cynical" or "downright mad," about the prospect of automation intruding on their day-to-day lives, potentially replacing them.