Earlier this summer, the Economist announced a competition for young people. They asked contestants to answer this question: "What fundamental economic and political change, if any, is needed for an effective response to climate change?" More than 2,400 people responded, from over 110 countries. And the Economist slipped one essay into the stack of submissions that their judges would review: an essay written by an artificial intelligence. The AI in question was GPT-2, a language-generating system developed by San Francisco AI lab OpenAI and announced this spring.

Furthermore, with advancements in quantum computing and machine learning, many notable public figures, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have indicated a growing concern with the imminent threat of AI surpassing human intelligence (Gosset, 2017). For instance, Darrell M. West, a political scientist, has proposed a protectionist framework that appeals to transhumanism, in which he restructures socioeconomic policy to account for changes in technology-induced unemployment. In particular, he posits that "Separating the dispersion of health care, disability, and pension benefits outside of employment offers workers with limited skills social benefits on a universal basis" (West, 2015). Expounding upon this equivocation, a more viable solution to potential unemployment is the realization of a multi-faceted policy which advocates the improvement of STEM-related education on a broad economic base, with habituation programs for the unskilled workforce. That is, with the implementation of appropriate and reformatory policies concerning the future development of AI technologies, this sector provides an economic incentive for new job creation, compatible with industrial development.

A universal condition of future U.S. armed interventions is the dizzying amount of data that American forces will have thrust upon them at, each level of war and in every dimension of combat. The single most important thing the U.S. military can do to adapt to the Information Age is to channel the impending torrent of information, from a multiplicity of data sources, to relevant decision makers in useful forms. The face of battle in this era will still be defined by blood and hardship, endured by small groups of people surviving their way to the next objective, but in a much more complex context. That complexity will be apparent, often paralyzing, when flooding through a cornucopia of sensor systems. Computers will help stem the tide, but distributed human innovation, in the space between information and knowledge, is the only force that can contextualize the flow.