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I recommend that you check out CounterStories, particularly readers interested in futurism, 5GW, IO and strategic thinking.

Edited by journalist, think tanker and long time blogfriend Paul Kretkowski, CounterStories develops scenarios for purposes of alternative analysis, counterintuitive thinking exercises, predictive futurism and good old fashioned fun. Scenarios are a very helpful complement to more quantitative futurist methodologies.

Jeff Stein of Spy Talk had a fascinating interview with Dr. David Charney, a CIA psychiatrist specializing in treating professional spooks. The whole article is interesting but the following caught my eye:

….But for case officers at the tip of the CIA’s spear, he said, the problem tends to be A.D.D., Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. 
“They seem to be highly functional A.D.D.’s,” Charney said. “You might think a person with ADD can’t tie their shoelaces, but quite the opposite.” To them, “boredom equals death,” Charney says, not really joking. 

“They’re energetic, restless, people who have to physically keep moving. Lock them to a desk, and they can’t deal with it. They can’t stand to be bored…” 

But A.D.D. can be an asset, too.  “They have the ability to absorb things from 360 degrees,” Charney marvels. 

“Contrast that with people who are linear, like your book-keeper or accountant, who chug along in a channel and get things done by going from one thing to another. But A.D.D. minds tend to be very synthetic. They reach out and pull things out of the air, or through other persons who are not linked in any way. They see patterns that other people don’t see. They can gather together unusual elements and bring them together into a whole that is a brilliant synthesis of things that would be lost on other people.  

“They have a sensitivity to ambient thoughts going on that a good case officer needs to pick up, little nuances, little hues, little things said that let you know if the agent you’ve recruited is telling the truth, or which is partly the truth … which buttons to push to manage the person, how to absorb material and put it into a whole. And the good ones have that ability.”

This is classic horizontal thinking with an emphasis on connections, patterns and synthesis driven by an internal “restlessness” – the kind of persona seen in such disparate occupations as fighter pilots, inventors, physicists and artists. There has long been a comparative and to an extent correlative association of ADHD or “hyperactivity” with creativity, high levels of intelligence and depression though of course not everyone with ADHD is creative, intellectually gifted, depressed or working for an intelligence agency. The correlation though has also been noted in MRI brain scan studies of children so it would appear to have a physiological basis that might explain why the CIA needs to have its own psychiatrists for reasons beyond the stress generated by a career in intelligence work – self-selection bias in people who apply to become employees.

(Hat tip to….one of my twitteramigos….I can’t find the tweet, damn it!) 

I’m as big a fan of technofuturistic science as the next reader of Danger Room but National Defense Magazine ‘s article really is breezily optimistic:

Reverse Engineering the Brain May Accelerate Robotics Research 

….Machines that walk upright will assist civilians and the military alike, said Stefan Schaal, associate professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Southern California.“We should at some point be able to create an artificial human being and I think humanoid robots are currently the first step toward that,” he said at the Army Science conference.“This is going to happen,” he predicted. “And it’s going to happen in this century.”It may not be as “polished” as the iRobot movie, he added.While other experts noted that there are huge technological hurdles to overcome, basic research continues on several critical technologies such as vision, movement and computational models that will allow robots to “think” like humans.A parallel effort to map – or reverse engineer – the human brain is going to give robotics experts inspiration that will allow them to create these advanced models, researchers at the conference said.The National Academy of Engineering is spearheading this “Grand Challenge.” Just as researchers successfully mapped the human genome earlier in the decade, the engineering community – not normally thought of as being a part of the life science discipline – says there will be a clear benefit to a Herculean effort to figure out exactly how the human mind works.“If we could determine the software of the human brain, we could embed all sorts of systems so as to provide human like quality for machines,” said John Parmentola, director of research and laboratory management at the Army office of the deputy assistant secretary for research and technology.Neural models will enable robots to better perceive, think, plan and act, said James Albus of the Krasnow Institute at George Mason University, Va.

“Significant economic and military applications will develop undoubtedly early in this century and in fact are already developing,” he said.
 

Read the rest here.

The part that makes me a tad skeptical is the “reverse engineering” of the brain. This is no small task. “Wetware” isn’t hardware and the wetware here is dynamically adaptive and to an extent individualized within parameters we do not yet fully understand. Unless I am missing something ( please correct me if I am) in terms of difficulty, reverse engineering the brain would appear to be harder than almost any other question that could possibly be related to the whole field of robotics itself. 

While scientists have learned more about the human brain in the last 10 years that the previous 10,000, brain science is still in it’s infancy. The exciting MRI scan studies are primarily exercises in positively identifying correlation of brain activity with specific cognitive and physical tasks; what these studies mean in terms of application requires extrapolative speculation and experimentation.

By all means guys, go for it! I’m behind the effort 100 % as the spillover benefits are going to be enormous. However, I’d wager that this strategy is not the fastest route to functionally useful, autonomously acting, robots on a societal scale.

ADDENDUM:

I just picked up P.W. Singer ‘s new book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.  Flipping through it quickly, I will say this is an extremely cool book designed to appeal to war nerds, tech geeks and defense policy wonks alike ( For example, if you read Singer’s ref to “the Big Cebrowski” and get it, well, then this book is for you). Some well known figures in the blogosphere also make it into Singer’s book but to find out who, you’ll have to go get a copy. 🙂

ADDENDUM II. 

Jeff Hawkins at TED.com on the revolutionary potential of brain science:

Two posts that broaden and inform the discussion:

From one of my my co-authors,  Adam Elkus at GroupIntel – “Can Strategy Be Crowdsourced?”:

…Confined to the tactical level, emergent groups often melt away once the tactical action they have formed to accomplish is over. While the anti-Scientology hacker collective Anonymous succeeded in bleeding the Church of Scientology (CoS), they failed to accomplish their stated task of destroying the organization. Anonymous took down some CoS websites, showed up on the streets wearing funny masks, and attracted some media attention. But without any mechanism for exploiting their tactical success, they could not sustain their momentum, making them a purely ephemeral phenomenon. Without the benefit of strategy, all Anonymous could do was cause disorder-but such petty nihilism has rarely accomplished anything of real importance.

Anonymous was kind of cyber-militia, not a band of cyber-soldiers. Galled by what they saw as the CoS’ heavy-handed censorship, they attacked it for a while before retiring back to their usual activities on the 4Chan IRC channel. Americans, ornery and independent by nature, tend to valorize militias and distrust professional militaries. But we often forget that our own militias lacked the means or motivation to battle the British for extended periods of time during the Revolution. Washington found it difficult to make them battle during harvest season, and could not force them to fight far from their homes and families. He required the likes of Baron Von Steuben to mold them into a disciplined and professional fighting force through the usage of repetitive drills and training. Our tech-hype about crowdsourcing is another form of militia worship that may be admirable and egalitarian in spirit but dangerous when it is used to overestimate the strategic abilities of emergent foes.

Read the rest here.

I enjoyed Adam’s post, partly because I rarely get to read something that links Edward Bernays, Jamais Casico and John Searle. I will quibble with Adam in that “crowdsourcing” phenomena or open systems that acquire a “community”aspect with recognizably distinct cultural norms are usually dominated by a “natural aristocracy” among the membership – a cadre of “influencers” who make qualitative contributions frequently and disproportionately and have individual and collective “auctoritas” to police the larger mass than contribute occasionally. There’s a “feedback loop” where certain members of “the crowd” add complex thinking for collective evaluation, modification and ratification. Linux is the original example as is Wikipedia, where senior and elusive”Wikipedians” carry great weight compared to say, me, logging on and editing away. An open mil-related community “crowdsourcing” strategy might do more than a decent job; it would be interesting to run a war game at Quantico with a group of U.S. military operations specialists vs. the membership of the Small Wars Council.

The second post is by “ josephfouche“* at The Committee of Public Safety blog – “The Tactical Loop“:

Elkus argues that the strengths attributed to crowdsourcing and other “wisdom of the crowd” phenomena are potentially strong on the tactical level but fail to scale to higher levels on the CPSOT stack. The higher layers on the stack, when compared to tactics:

• Have OODA loops that operate over longer time-frames, larger space-frames, and involve fewer people per loop and fewer people overall across all groups of loops.
• Have loops that are, to varying degrees, more removed from direct interaction with external forces. This places them in a worse position and under less pressure to observe and adapt to “unfolding interaction” with the environment since that interaction has to be transmitted through tactics and other intermediate layers (producing a higher “signal-to-noise” ratio, as Zen points out).
• Have (increasingly) fewer loops.

Concepts from Howard Bloom’s Global Brain are useful here to demonstrate the elements the higher layers of the CPSOT stack need to align in order to steal some of that vim and vigor from tactics:

1. diversity generators: agents that generate new hypotheses.
2. conformity enforcers: agents that ensure that agents have enough in common to exchange hypotheses.
3. inner-judges: systems that decide if an individual hypothesis is true (it other words, that it survives) or if something is untrue (if it fails).
4. intergroup tournaments: competitions between groups that test the hypotheses produced by one group against hypotheses produced by other groups. Victory produces truth and defeat is the father of lies.
5. resource shifters: systems that do the dirty work for inner judges and intergroup tournaments. They heavily reward winning hypotheses and heavily punish hypotheses that perform poorly. Bloom summarizes this by quoting the Lord: For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.

Tactics have more of each of these elements than higher layers on the stack which involve fewer and fewer people. This means fewer hypotheses to loop through and more conformity enforcing gatekeepers. A great deal of what the higher layers do is filter out the multiple hypotheses produced by tactics and its direct interaction with the unfolding environment and use conformity enforcement to pare down the number of hypotheses and make them more consistent. This is similar to how Jeff Hawkins hypothesizes that the human brain works in his memory-prediction framework:

Like tdaxp, I am a big fan of Howard Bloom’s Global Brain and “josephfouche” shares a preference with tdaxp and myself for employing “horizontal” thinking and synthesis in his posts. Ideally the “higher levels” should be filtering out bad or unworkable hypothesis and speculation by some kind of empirical -or at least reasonable – criteria. The problem in our bureaucratic system is the preference for anachronistic frameworks or schemas on the part of senior managers who are doing the filtering (even when the process is untainted by politics or personal agendas). The critical decision-makers need to be in the paradox of have an objective, cognitive distance from the tactical or the small world yet be intimately in touch with it. They must juggle multiple perspectives at once and find a workable synthesis or leverage point.

* Interesting blogging nom de guerre. For those unfamiliar with French history, Joseph Fouche was the Jacobin Terrorist “Butcher of Lyons” who became Napoleon Bonaparte’s – and modern Europe’s first – secret police chief and later managed to serve the restored Bourbon kings in that capacity, though I cannot recall which branch. When asked by Napoleon what he would do if he, Napoleon, were killed in battle, Fouche candidly answered ” Sire, I would try to seize as much power for myself as possible” Nice.

The SWJ Blog published an op-ed by Colonel David Maxwell entitled “Random Thoughts on Irregular Warfare and Security Assistance (Full PDF Article)“. Like a lot of more open-ended, ruminating pieces, Maxwell’s post was “generative” in the sense of trying to articulate insights regarding a complex situation, which Col. Maxwell accomplished. Here’s the section that raised my eyebrow:

…First we need to look at ourselves critically and ask if we have been able to develop effective strategies and campaign plans and then support and execute them, respectively. I think that most all of our challenges can be attributed to our strategies and campaign plans (and I will caveat this and say we need to understand that in this world of irregular warfare, complex operations and hybrid warfare there is no cookie cutter strategy or campaign plan template that will work the first time, every time. We need to be agile and flexible and be able to adapt to constantly morphing conditions). But I would say that this is where we need to focus most of all because our forces at the tactical level from all Services have proven very adept and capable and have demonstrated that they are truly learning organizations

Why would the “tactical”level have acheived “learning organization” status and not the “operational” and “strategic” levels of military command? Some possibilities:

• The social networks within the official hierarchical org at the tactical level can effectively leverage both weak and strong ties 
• Greater degree of shared purpose and sense of mission
• The tactical level, being a “smaller world” in systems terms than the operational or strategic levels, has a much better “signal to noise” ratio.
• The social networks within the hierarchical org at the tactical level create an environment of greater transparency -discussion may be squelched but situational awareness can’t be.
• Encouragement of critical discussion and incentives for problem-solving.
• Greater tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Tacit knowledge is likely to quickly become explicit organizational, knowledge through “shop talk”, the grapevine, de-briefing and formal “lessons learned” dissemination procedures.
• The stress and danger of the tactical evironment itself is an incentive to adapt and learn – “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Samuel Johnson.
   

Can the operational and strategic levels of the military ( or any organization with a bureaucratic structure – schools, corporations, government agencies etc.) become a “learning organization” despite greater scale, distance from events, degrees of abstraction and other obstacles? Of course. However it depends greatly on two things – creating a “tighter” network with a high velocity of meaningful communication and a new kind of leadership committed to the hard work of re-engineering the organizational culture around adaptive “fitness” and learning.