November 10, 2018

Propaganda, the past, present and future of war, AI and more: best of the week’s news

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Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

Propaganda: the good, the bad and the ugly (fake news)

Fake news is certainly not a recent creation and although the whole of the fake propaganda industry has become much more sophisticated of late due to the proliferation of digital technologies, the concept itself is as old as the hills – probably as ancient as the world’s second oldest profession, journalism, with the best-known example being the Trojan Horse and the anonymous ancient Greek ‘reporter’ who broke the news of its arrival to the gullible Trojans.

Having lived for 35 years in the undisputed black (or rather red) propaganda leader in the history of humankind – the Soviet Union – I can myself testify to the incredible power of fake news, spread around not digitally or electronically, but in a rather antediluvian way by bunches of officially vetted peripatetic liars, the so-called ‘lecturers’, who travelled the length and breadth of the vast empire addressing crowds in so-called ‘lectoriums’ (or should I say ‘lectoria’?) which existed in every sizeable Soviet city or town.

The fake news was, of course, spread by radio, TV and newspapers, too (in fact, there was hardly any ‘un-fake’ news in all of those), but with the prevailing lack of popular trust in the official and highly centralised mass media, the travelling lecturers were much more believable. They were also allowed (even encouraged) to overstep the limits of the officially accepted information diet ever-so-slightly to reveal the ‘facts’ (read fake news) which, for all sorts of idiotic reasons, remained taboo for the mainstream media.

One example which I still remember very clearly is the rumour (presented by the lecturers as a fact, no doubt) that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident (then) Soviet writer was ethnically Jewish and that his real name was actually… wait for it… Solzhenitser! In the eyes of the Kremlin propaganda gurus, well aware of the extent of grassroots anti-Semitism in the country, that was the ideal way of compromising the maverick scribe clandestinely (for openly anti-Semitic statements would normally be censored by the official Soviet media operating under the guise of ‘internationalism’) and therefore much more effectively!

Days after the above fake news was launched in the lectorium of the city where I then lived, I heard it repeated in the streets, in food queues and even in the corridors of the university where I studied. This is just one of the many hundreds of examples. I was therefore interested to read Paul Dempsey’s conclusion in the above article that, just like all those years ago, most of the fake news these days is written not by machines but by humans and that the worst kind of “guff” is still “manually crafted”. Plus ça change, as the French say.

Before I go, here’s a relevant piece of real – not fake – news: a new translation (by Jordan Peterson) of Solzhernitsyn’s epic book “The Gulag Archipelago” has just been published. As the Times newspaper commented wryly earlier this week, this book must be read by every remaining Marxist (meaning that after reading it no one would want to remain one, I presume). I believe that anyone, Marxist or not, can benefit from reading that great work which describes the events that were – hugely unfortunately – all too real and not at all fake.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

Artiﬁcial intelligence: real war

Propaganda: the good, the bad and the ugly (fake news)

Military by nature: biomimetic inspiration for future armies

Drone warfare: the autonomous debate

Future of war, part one: land battles, tank development

War! Huh! What is it good for?

To which the correct answer of course, is “Absolutely nothing”. Which, as we show in our latest issue of E&T, is not entirely true. Because what it is undoubtedly good at is advancing technology, albeit technology used for doing war better. In fact, if anyone has made the trip to the slightly tired but still excellent air museum at Duxford (the Cambridgeshire wing of the Imperial War Museum), one of the most fascinating things is a timeline of aviation. Starting with the Wright brothers bouncing along with monochromatic charm – only 115 years ago – the first big jump in technology came during the First World War (the centenary of the end of which prompted our E&T issue theme, obviously). Suddenly bi-planes were part of the war effort, although mainly for reconnaissance.

Although design gradually improved, bi-planes were still in active service up to the start of the Second World War, but with war again imminent and airborne strength critical, the design of aircraft on all sides accelerated incredibly as planes were developed that are more reminiscent of modern aircraft. Then, once more, conflict advanced matters, as the Cold War drove aerospace technology to its extremes. The Duxford timeline really highlights this concurrence between technology spikes and war, or expectation of it. The makeshift landing craft behind the D-Day landings is another example of military necessity being the mother of invention.

This level of innovation, whether in developing the machines for war or the codes at Bletchley, allied to the bravery of those at the business end of using them, is still inspirational today even for a generation who have never had to experience a full-scale international conflict. Personally, I don’t actually hug trees, but I guess that is the demographic that I fall into, so the actual instruments of war I find horrific – but still fascinating. In our issue, we covered all sorts of angles about what a future world war might look like, both in terms of the hardware and the new instruments of war in cyber space.

I’m not so sure a global conflict will ever be resolved without land being won. The victors might not even want the land, but they will not be victorious unless those land battles are won and the tools described in our issue can be used to fight this battle on land, as well as at sea and in the air.

However, there is that rather large elephant in the global room. What happens when superpowers collide? Recent conflicts have seen USA, Russia and China nibbling away with opposing factions without having a direct face-off. If it did happen, would we see those endless bombing raids experienced in the Second World War which saw so many British and German cities flattened, when all that damage could be done now with a single nuclear bomb, fired from a safe distance.

Nothing new in that, of course, but there is a difference between fully equipping our armed forces to meet the requirements of new types of threat and conflict and facing up to what World War III might look like.

My next film review, incidentally, will be of ‘Mortal Engines’, a film set several millennia in the future. A time when the Ancients (that’s us by the way) virtually wiped out humanity in the ‘Sixty Minute War’. While we are not on the precipice like we were for the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s, it’s pretty clear that the guys with their fingers on the button round the world have the sort of egos that make them unsuitable guardians of global peace. As Lee Williams points out in his excellent article ‘Artiﬁcial intelligence: real war’, what happens if global war is determined by AI as the best way to generate paperclips (you’ll need to read the article for that to make sense)? The point being, of course, that there remain many doubts as to our ability to control AI.

So, despite the fascination with big boys’ war toys – and certainly a tip of the hat to the way conflict advances technology – give me a tree to hug, figuratively, any day of the week.

Dickon Ross, editor-in-chief

The War Issue

This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday and it’s the Armistice Centenary. That’s 100 years ago this Sunday, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the warring countries signed the agreement to end hostilities in the First World War. As well as some fascinating features on the history of camouflage, the Bailey Bridge and 11 lasting innovations from the Great War, we look to a future where technology is increasingly taking the soldier away from the action, away from the danger zone. We look at the risks and benefits of this next technology revolution in how wars will be fought. Read my introduction to our coverage.

Lorna Sharpe, sub-editor

Comment: How to take the soldier out of war

A history of First World War technology in 11 objects

The latest issue of E&T takes as its theme the Armistice on 11 November 1918, 100 years ago, when the guns of what we now call the First World War fell silent. For many of our readers that’s distant history now, just as the Napoleonic Wars were distant history for my generation – but for me and many like me, it’s close enough to feel a connection. My grandfather fought in France and was gassed and temporarily blinded. It had other effects, too – my mother recalled how in her own youth he would tremble silently in the Morrison shelter during the air raids of the Second World War. My parents’ generation had their own war stories, of course, and London’s bomb sites and prefabs were still in evidence throughout the 1960s.

More specifically, I was brought up to wear a poppy in remembrance because of another personal connection. My mother’s friend Hilda was married to Uncle George, who had been disabled by war wounds and worked in the poppy factory in Richmond. They lived in a British Legion flat nearby. He died young and a few years later Hilda formed a new relationship. Uncle Ron also worked in the poppy factory and drove a specially adapted car because he only had one leg. Every year, when I keep the two minutes’ silence and watch the remembrance commemorations on television I think of the consequences of war and pray that our political leaders around the world will choose better paths.

Sadly, we know that the war a hundred years ago turned out not to be ‘the war to end all wars’ that was predicted at the time. Much of this issue of E&T looks at present and future technologies associated with war and defence. Part of me would like to take a totally pacifist view on all this, but there are overflowing refugee camps around the world because we haven’t yet worked out how to prevent the situations that end in aggression by armed forces against civilians, so sometimes fighting back looks like the least bad option.

I don’t know the answers – but don’t let anyone tell you that the centenary events glorify war. They don’t. They remind us of its consequences.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

The art and evolution of military camouflage

Military uniforms past and future: ‘What did you wear in the war, Daddy?’

Two interesting photo essays [disclaimer: I wrote one of them] relating to the centenary of the end of the First World War, looking at how the requirements of conflicts fought since have evolved. Camouflage is now considered a military staple, a must-have basic requirement, although this hasn’t always been the case. It was only during the First World War, a little over 100 years ago, that camouflage became widely used (by the French artist ‘camofleurs’, as it happens) and its design and deployment have been gradually changing ever since – almost imperceptibly, just as good camouflage should.

Comparing the uniforms of a First World War ‘Tommy’ – with his steel Brodie helmet, heavy woollen uniform and leather boots – to a Russian military ‘Solider of the Future’ battle suit, unveiled at a recent defence expo – the wearer so protected from head to foot that it seems almost impossible for them to come to any serious harm – serves to underline the role that technology has played in the wars of the last 100 years. The two soliders would barely recognise each other as comrades in arms. Sadly, despite 100 years of fighting in almost every country on the planet, wiping out hundreds of millions of human lives, the mere existence and perceived necessity of a ‘Solider of the Future’ outfit tells us that the next 100 years will almost certainly see yet more death and destruction.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Five new UK medical centres to adopt AI for disease diagnosis

It can be annoying and inconvenient, but I’m generally grateful for the fact that these days doctors will escalate anything the see in a man of my age which causes them concern rather than adopting the approach they might have taken in less enlightened (and litigious) times of, “Well, you have to expect that sort of thing as you get older. It’s probably nothing to worry about.”

At the same time as the relief when a hospital visit ends up with a specialist concluding within a couple of minutes that there really is nothing to worry about, however, there’s a slight sense of guilt that you’re taking up valuable NHS resources. Not to mention the crippling parking charges that are often unavoidable.

So although I’m sceptical that artificial intelligence is quite the silver bullet for saving the British health service that some politicians are keen to talk it up as, I can see lots of good reasons for spending £50m on centres to look at how it can help in disease diagnosis as part of the current administration’s industrial strategy. There are bound to be concerns about accuracy, just as there are with any task that’s traditionally been done by a human with years of experience being handed over to a robot counterpart, but as reliability increases those tens of millions of investment are likely to end up saving significantly more in administrative costs and doctors’ time. Not to mention giving patients a speedy diagnosis instead of making them wait weeks or even months for an appointment.

One thing I’m not convinced by is whether the government is going about selling this to the public in a persuasive way. Undoubtedly it’s the biggest potential vote-winner of the various elements of the industrial strategy: nobody’s likely to change their political allegiance based on a party’s enthusiasm for battery technology, quantum devices or driverless cars, I suspect.

Describing the initiative as part of a long-term plan to “transform the NHS into an ecosystem of enterprise and innovation that allows technology to flourish and evolve,” as the Health Secretary did this week will be – for most of the public – a case of focusing on the wrong thing. Nothing wrong with it in principle, but the government needs to work harder at explaining how £50m is better spent on R&D with potentially massive future benefits than being pumped into basic services for the country’s cash-strapped hospitals.

Mark Ballard, associate editor

China seeks greater control over the global internet

This is the week when Xi Jinping, who presides over a China whose authorities have been in the news a lately for locking people up for their views and their ethnicity, made ominous news by calling for a global internet treaty for the sake of cyber security.

This was the same week that Rockstar Games got police in Melbourne, Australia, to raid the house of a man called Christopher Anderson, for selling games mods that allow people to cheat in its multiplayer battles. And Jeff Koons, rebellious artist of distinguished distaste, was sued for works that satirised famous adverts.

As the worlds of art and tech merge, the authorities are making it tame. And as tech democratises the world, they are taming the word, too.

Censors have long been at work in Europe, where people have been locked up for propagandising against the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and are still angry long since the foundation of Israel and its brutal oppression and subjection of hostile neighbours and assassinations of its rivals. And Facebook has been removing posts made by people with bigoted views believed to have incited people to burn the houses of foreigners in Germany and spark a genocide in Myanmar.

Now China, which has long opposed the standard international internet governance treaty – the Budapest Convention of Cybercrime – has decided it wants an international agreement after all. China, Russia and their post-communist compadres are the most notable non-signatories of the Budapest Convention, an instrument drafted by the Council of Europe, but taken up by many other significant countries across the Americas, Africa and Asia. Budapest opponents tried to set up a rival internet treaty a decade ago. They wanted to have a part in drafting the rules, they said, and they wanted to drop the bit in it about civil liberties, which said police can’t just raid whatever computers they like when they see fit and there should be measures to respect people’s rights to privacy and freedom of speech.

It all seemed to be going so well in the 1980s, when New York City – the great crucible of free speech – spawned hip-hop, the sublime street art, through which ignorant, spirited people claimed their birthright by mouthing off over snatches of music pilfered from other people’s copyrighted records. That was art.

Then came Rockstar Games, which made $6bn from the sale of a single computer game about the same stereotyped ghetto streets from which the rappers and DJs of New York’s hip-hop scene claimed as their authority to speak with rough and tumble and say whatever the hell they liked because that is how it is, or how it was, largely, before mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the streets with his zero-tolerance of vagrants and repeat offenders and who, along with Tony Blair in the UK, created a clean slate, a more civil world, by the wholesale locking up of a generation of malcontents and maladjusted.

Multiplayer-game modding has been an art and a liberty since the great ID Games made it a feature of its Doom games in the mid-90s. Free software, riotous computer games and hip-hop – and yet they say the ’90s were naff.

Rockstar cashed in on the hip-hop stereotype with its riotous games, then dissed them royally, like it had twisted its heel on their heritage, like it was the stub end of an old joint. That’s art made commerce.

The Rockstar case gets right to the heart of the matter, though. That is just how hard you should hit someone who doesn’t play by your rules. Rockstar sets rules because it has money and power. How does it go? “It’s the rich wot makes the rules and the poor wot cops the blame”. And ain’t it always the same? Instead of just doing more to arrange its multilayer games to send people off when they are caught cheating, it is seeking create a new precedent for the law of copyright, so that anyone who adapts a software program without a given artistic licence will have their house raided by the police, their possessions confiscated and restrictions placed on their use of computers, as happened to Anderson, the rebellious coder in Melbourne. It would likely have them locked up as well and made to pay more money into its great coffers. Rockstar will probably hire its own police force before long and do its own raids on people who are not content with the pretence of rebelliousness that is the theme of its games. It’s those in power that make idiotic rules and those without power who are too stupid to avoid breaking them.

There is a solution to this problem, though. Digitally round up all those people dissatisfied with their lot, who can’t be trusted to play the game or express their minds. Get all those people whose sense of humour is not drawing-room civil. Get the culturally uncouth, the ill-educated, those ignorant and angry, those with numb skulls made hateful. Give them a special social network all their own, with its own special games. Call it Chavnet: a place where social inferiors can express their right to free speech without it infecting society and inciting people to burn houses inhabited by people with swarthy looks, smelly food, outlandish dress, better educations, intellects and job prospects. Hire prep-school prefects and finishing school graduates to invigilate it. And don’t let them out. Just don’t let them out. Lock up a generation.

No, that’s it. Just put them in pens like the Chinese do. Free speech is permissible only to those with power and only then for it to be used in the art of bullshit. People with power like Trump, who can say what they like because they have power, or people with civility, like Melania, who will only say what you like. Do that. Call it civil liberties.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

Propaganda: the good, the bad and the ugly (fake news)

Tim Fryer, technology editor

Artiﬁcial intelligence: real war

Propaganda: the good, the bad and the ugly (fake news)

Military by nature: biomimetic inspiration for future armies

Drone warfare: the autonomous debate

Future of war, part one: land battles, tank development

War! Huh! What is it good for?

So, despite the fascination with big boys’ war toys – and certainly a tip of the hat to the way conflict advances technology – give me a tree to hug, figuratively, any day of the week.