Machine Learning

It’s the middle of July, and the air is like French onion soup direct from the stove—a thick, unbreathable mass of scalding, body-odor-scented liquid. Almost everyone afoot is young, impossibly fit, usually jogging faster than I can sprint, dressed in scraps of painted-on lycra. Up and down Atlanta’s Beltline,¹ businesses are pumping out a kaleidoscopic flurry of music, an Ivesian stew of sound, a chaotic soundtrack that says summer far better than the fizziest pop single ever could on its own. I am sitting in front of Pour, a serve-yourself-brewery that has been my writing office for some months, with a foil-wrapped burrito to my left, a tall glass of golden IPA to my right, and a notebook in front of me. It’s a good day.

And some son of a bitch is flying a fucking drone.

If ever there was a moment I wished I was armed, this is it. It would be deeply satisfying to draw a bead on the hovering camera platform and blast a load of buckshot right through someone’s cloying Atlanta Beltline Youtube video. There’s something about the bone-drill polyphonic whine of a drone that acts like a meathook, dragging one out of the saturnalian luxury of the weekend back into the grim day-to-day froth of the demeaning, reductive, and poisonous news cycle that proliferates through the psyche like black mold crawling slowly up drywall.

The first thing I think about when I hear that tinny whine is how, for days, months, and years now, this sound has been for so many people a harbinger of doom—the last thing many of them hear before passing through the veil. Admittedly, my personal obsessions render me more prone to the darker implications of that toylike buzzing, but…

But I suspect I’m not alone. The topic of the election, which as we’ve seen contains both the seeds and fruits of violence, is always present in even the most casual conversations, even if it’s simply making a cameo. It’s hard to relax when the world is spinning off its axis, and war lurks around every corner now. I’m tired of living in interesting times, aren’t you?

Counterpoint: only a maniac sees a drone and immediately leaps to images of Russian soldiers curled in muddy holes, peppered with shrapnel and maneuvering the barrel of a rifle into their mouths. But that’s what “drone” is to me now. Who knows how long it will be until “AI” conjures up similar associations?

It seems at first a curious thing that this round of technological evolution should have arrived first in the private world, with fairly unimpressive results if we’re being honest, before becoming such a big hit in the business of killing people. But industry and military necessity are deeply intertwined, and wars have a way of bringing out the harmful nature of what might once have seemed anodyne curiosities. The airplane was born in a time of peace, and tanks are just armored farm tractors with mounted howitzers. Rockets and jet engines were somebody’s hobbies before they became a means of shredding people from great distances.

What war does far better than the private sector is to rapidly hone technological developments. Robert Goddard’s 1926 liquid fuel rocket was a toy, a mere snapdragon, a beefier cousin to the bottle rocket. Germany’s V2 was a demon, a tube of death that could be automatically guided to a target hundreds of miles away with unprecedented accuracy. It was an artifact at once grounded in historical warfare but aimed toward a terrifying future in which rockets could be launched from the Siberian tundra to blast American cities half a globe away.

Pathfinding algorithms are great for videogames. And warheads.

So now we have a hot war—a couple, really— again honing technologies of questionable civilian value into new and terrifying modes of flesh chopping. When Russia’s regular divisions crossed the Ukrainian frontier in February of 2022, drones were quickly enlisted to provide a new and fairly obvious means of surveilling the battlefield. In short order some enterprising drone operator figured out how to drop a grenade—the sort of straight-forward task for which you might find an Indestructible if there were any application beyond grinding human bodies into chaff. First-person “suicide” drones appeared very quickly thereafter, and as of this writing drones mounting machine guns for combat with other drones have begun to emerge.

There’s a lot of evolutionary pressure at work right now, and evolution is one of the most powerful forces on Earth. The fact that you’re sitting here reading this, as opposed to scouring a meagre living from volcanic vents on the sea floor, is indicative of the godlike power of evolution. There are a couple million men and women struggling for survival in the south and east of Ukraine, to say nothing of Gaza,² and that’s a lot of desperation to pour into the industry of killing.

That brings us to so-called AI. Thanks to the recent proliferation of Large Language Models, the popular idea of AI has come to mean chatbots that seem to know everything and respond to questions with the kind of self-assured swagger of university professors who have somehow become mass media darlings, even as they spew nonsense. In fact chatbots are just smiley faces plopped in front of sentence generators—a technology that has been around for decades, but the interface cleverly convinces us we’re seeing something new.³

They aren’t intelligent; they don’t reason; they simply make sentences. But artificial intelligence is broader than LLMs, and where LLMs have failed to make much headway in the private sector due to being a) often wrong, b) grotesquely superfluous⁴ and c) hilariously expensive, machine-learning algorithms have an obvious place on the battlefield, and if autonomous drones are not already out there rending human flesh, they will be soon enough.

AIs are fairly easy to trick once you know their weaknesses, but when you’re talking about tens of thousands of drones seeking out targets on a battlefield chock-a-block with them, they are, like spam, effective. Anyone who has ever played Berserk knows that it’s not the cleverness of the algorithm so much as the inexorability of machines that gets you in the end.

And so, on this fine midsummer day, enjoying the hundred degree heat as best as I am able, I ask you not to talk to me about the wonders of technology, nor its avatars. None of us need anything more than fresh air, good food, perhaps a beer or some other sort of refreshment, and a friend or two to talk to. I celebrated the Apple ][ when I was young and I look back with some fondness at the marvels of my youth, but things have changed. It’s no longer a matter of the joy of the hobbyist, tinkering with machines as one might a steam engine. All progress now seems both relentless and amoral, devoid of purpose other than to fatten the wallets of a handful of frankly thoughtless people hustling for cash in the charnel house of humanity. They may have fooled some of us into thinking it’s a valuable thing to be able to get a computer to generate a recipe for schnitzel in the style of Chaucer. Personally, I’d rather just have a conversation with another human being. If we keep giving them the keys to the gun locker, the machines will come for all of us, eventually.

I recently noticed that I used the word “Rubicon” as a title not once but twice. I feel like a tool, though truth be told, Rubicon is a great title. Maybe I should use it for everything I write. I have, in the interest of the Collected Works of Fletcher Moore, to be published long after I have been blown to smithereens by a machine that can’t distinguish me from Vladimir Putin, changed the name of the second essay to Rubicon, Redux.

Also, I’m going to do this shit again:

1. BeltLine, if you do camel-case, which—outside of code—I do not. Interstitial caps are a product of marketing, and I don’t market other people’s things for free. Even non-profit things.

2. Gaza is different than Ukraine, and if you’re wondering why I haven’t given the former the attention I’ve given the latter, know that a) I have, just not in writing, and b) I have reasons for leaving it largely out of my arguments. I’m hoping to address the Israel-Gaza conflict one day soon but it’s rather a mouthful.

3. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-54975-5_7 

4. Does the world really need more sentences?