Bots Could Permanently Change the Military Chain of Command

Everyone on the internet had a great time with Tay, Microsoft's Twitter robot that became a racist Holocaust denier in a matter of a few hours (then came back and did it again). The company had created a public relations flap -- more incident than a disaster -- while giving the public an object lesson on the pros and cons of machine learning: Automation can harness patterns to fascinating effect at speed, but the results will be predictably hard to predict. As is often the case, the military is an early adopter of automation technology. It is -- at one time -- leading the charge toward machine learning and also trying desperately to keep up. One of the main areas of focus for the Pentagon is autonomous robots and how they will team with humans – a R2D2-style robot wingman, for instance. But this week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work outlined another task for A.I.: open-source data crunching.