John Long - Darwin’s Devices

In the beginning what neither Butch nor I appreciated was that each time Ted led me through the dissection of an animal, he was also guiding me on multiple levels, challenging me to make my implicit assumptions explicit and justify my positions. I don’t recall if it was over a wildebeest or a hippo, but he quickly learned of my interest in war and my background in the Coast Guard. I’m sure he must have understood my romantic/heroic naïveté, because he quickly took me to several used book stores to expand my military library. I soon learned that my elementary school’s reading list hadn’t included the likes of Wilfred Owen, the British soldier and poet who wrote from the World War I trenches of a fellow infantryman gassed by a German shell:

I hadn’t read Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” a first-person account of Vietnam from what we would call, today, an embedded reporter:

Whenever I heard something outside of our clenched little circle I’d practically flip, hoping to God that I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. A couple of rounds fired off in the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a breath. Once I thought I saw a light moving in the jungle and I caught myself just under a whisper saying, “I’m not ready for this, I’m not ready for this.” [200] Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

These days, Ted points out that although I have left behind the facile romanticism of war as the hero’s journey, what really appears to have me bothered, he says, is the secretiveness that is essential to waging war. He might be right. I hate telling and keeping secrets, as my children will tell you, because someone always gets hurt when you withhold information. That parental stance informs my professional life too.

In the summer of 1999 Rob and I, at ONR’s request, went to the Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST) conference hosted biannually by the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute. With us was Peter Czuwala, the engineer working in my lab, who presented on analytical models of swimming fish that he and our students, Craig Blanchette and Stephanie Varga, had spearheaded. Any moral concerns that our students voiced about working for the Navy I addressed by explaining that all of our work was available in the public domain. [201] Peter and Craig’s model can be found in this article: P. J. Czuwala, C. Blanchette, S. Varga, R. G. Root, and J. H. Long Jr., “A Mechanical Model for the Rapid Body Flexures of Fast-Starting Fish,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST) , 415–426 (Lee, NH: Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute, 1999). At the same meeting Rob presented this paper: R. G. Root, H-W. Courtland, C. A. Pell, B. Hobson, E. J. Twohig, R. J. Suter, W. R. Shepherd, III, N. Boetticher, and J. H. Long Jr., “Swimming Fish and Fish-like Models: The Harmonic Structure of Undulatory Waves Suggests That Fish Actively Tune Their Bodies,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST), 378–388 (Lee, NH: Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute, 1999). I was proud, I said, to have the Department of Defense supporting nonproprietary work on fish. No secrets. [202] The irony is that secrecy is enforced when I work with and advise companies. Both business and the military use secrecy to maintain an advantage over the competition or adversaries. For the record, I honor all of my agreements with businesses to keep our proprietary work secret.

For his part, Rob’s line in the sand was making weapons. Toward the end of this UUST meeting, our program officer, the person running the ONR’s Bioengineering Program and overseeing our research grant, sat all of her grantees down in a room. We had heard rumors of the pressure that she and other ONR administrators were getting from the admiralty to justify all of this academic, basic research. “In future research proposals to ONR,” she said, “we want to see explicit reference to how your work will help us make better weapons-delivery platforms.” Rob and I looked at each other and said, “We’re done.”

But we’re not done. As long as we work on fish and robotic fish, even if we publish openly, we are part of a new arms race, a race among fifty-six countries working to weaponize robots. [203] The race continues unabated: E. Bumiller and T. Shanker, “War Evolves with Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs,” New York Times , June 19, 2011. Given that everyone is building robots for war, we’d be wise to heed DARPA’s mission: “prevent technological surprise from harming our national security.” One way to avoid surprise is to consider the obvious. By “obvious” I mean all that is available to you and me, those of us without special clearances, the not-secret information that, when you look at it from a different perspective, may allow you to guess about what is happening in secret. We’ll take a look from our new perspective of evolving robots.

Although most of the military robotic systems I know about appear to be remotely controlled, with a human in the control loop, some are semiautonomous. It won’t be long before fully autonomous robots are in operation because they can operate faster and more accurately than humans. [204] For the latest on autonomous robots in war: L. G. Weiss, “Autonomous Robots in the Fog of War,” IEEE Spectrum 48, no. 8 (2011): 30–57. Their improved performance on the battlefield will drive innovation in that direction. Speed kills.

After that the logical direction, as I see it, is to move toward robots adapting their behavior as the battle wages. Behavioral adaptation is what makes rag-tag rebels so hard to beat in a protracted war. As part of the rebel alliance, you may be outmanned and outgunned, but every enemy has a weakness; if you can figure it out and take advantage, then you have a chance. For example, the US military is vulnerable to attack from improvised explosive devices, simple but deadly weapons that disrupt vehicular patrols in Iraq and fuel delivery in Afghanistan. The fastest way to adapt is through learning, and if you are a robot this means getting feedback about your performance that changes your onboard software. Behavioral adaptation is already well established in robots, with multiple methods for learning. One such adaptive learning algorithm is called an “adaptive neural control chaos circuit,” invented by Poramate Manoonpong, professor of physics at Gottingen University in Germany, and his colleagues for rapid and reversible learning in changing environmental conditions. [205] Silke Steingrube, Marc Timme, Florentin Worgotter, and Poramate Manoonpong, “Self-Organized Adaptation of a Simple Neural Circuit Enables Complex Robot Behaviour,” Nature Physics 6, no. 3 (2010): 224–230.