Sentient programs

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They pointed out that the commercial satellite industry has software that can tally shipping containers on cargo ships and cars in parking lots soon after their pictures are snapped in space. He paused and shifted in his seat. It means anything with a timestamp and a location stamp, and the attempt to integrate all that sundry data. Then, Parikh actually answered this question: When would that translate to near-instantaneous understanding and strategy development?

But an initiative called Sentient has relevant capabilities. A product of the National Reconnaissance Office NRO , Sentient is or at least aims to be an omnivorous analysis tool , capable of devouring data of all sorts, making sense of the past and present, anticipating the future, and pointing satellites toward what it determines will be the most interesting parts of that future.

That, ideally, makes things simpler downstream for human analysts at other organizations, like the NGA, with which the satellite-centric NRO partners. Until now, Sentient has been treated as a government secret, except for vague allusions in a few speeches and presentations. Research related to Sentient has been going on since at least October , when the agency posted a request for Sentient Enterprise white papers.

In , a presentation posted online claimed Sentient would go live that year, although Furgerson told The Verge it was currently under development. The agency has been developing this artificial brain for years, but details available to the public remain scarce.

It could also free up humans to focus on deep analysis rather than tedious needle-finding. But it could also contain unquestioned biases, come to dubious conclusions, and raise civil liberties concerns. For those reasons, details about Sentient remain classified and what we can say about it is limited.

Satellite programs have generally been some of the most hush-hush intelligence initiatives. The first program to take pictures from space, Corona , began in , and the satellite successfully shot its first bucket of film back through the atmosphere in August Before him lay likenesses of airfields and military installations in the Soviet Union. Now, nearly six decades after the NRO was founded, the sky is crowded with other downward-looking satellites, some owned by private intelligence companies.

Do that well enough, and a company or intelligence agency could build a tower of knowledge about the past, comprehend present events faster than their competitors, and — maybe someday — predict the future. As the commercial industry has built up its network of Earth-observing orbiters, the intelligence community has taken notice. In , the NRO took over purchasing responsibility, and has since signed at least three new contracts.

One was with a company called Maxar, which owns some of the most powerful high-resolution satellites in the private sector and, for a long time, was pretty much the only company selling satellite images to the NRO. The third contractor is BlackSky. How might Sentient connect the dots, though? In addition to images, that could include financial data, weather information, shipping stats, information from Google searches, records of pharmaceutical purchases, and more, he says.

In the future, it plans to have up to 60 of its own Earth-observing satellites. All of that information goes into different processing pipelines based on its type. From a news story, BlackSky may extract people, places, organizations, and keywords.

From an image, it may map out which buildings appear damaged after an earthquake. In the real world, BlackSky might use that to keep track of the positions of Russian jets.

Unlike any other AIs in existence, it differs in the degree of independence. Usually, the algorithm works with the loaded information, but Sentient can even direct satellites to get images of the objects it needs. In fact, it can be called an artificial brain. As it appears, the military and other government intelligence agencies have the most advanced artificial intelligence-based big data processing algorithms.

Until recently, Sentient was a well-kept state secret while experts have been working on the program since October I agree to receive email updates and promotions. As far as can be judged, the task of the Sentient control algorithm is, based on the collected data, to redirect the satellites to where something interesting for the military is happening or will happen according to AI calculations.

In addition, it is known that the volume of photos taken up by Sentient has grown exponentially: over the years, the Pentagon has been content with the services of one civilian contractor who transmitted satellite images.

Now, it can be noted that this number has grown and similar algorithms belong to several other commercial or private intelligence companies such as Maxar, Planet, and BlackSky. These systems collect data from social networks, satellites, sensors in smart devices, airplanes, and ships. This information can be used equally effectively to determine the aftermath of an earthquake, find enemy military equipment, or simply sell it to third parties. The officials have declined to answer any direct questions about the directions and scale of the use of AI in the NRO, citing the danger of disclosing data important to enemies.

The way this artificial brain was revealed and the approach in giving additional information has to make you think about some potential outcomes for the near or distant future. Quite possibly certainly, I would say , there are other arbitrarily large AI-based military systems in development or probably already in use. Such systems can be deployed and used without us, the public, realizing that they exist and interfere with our daily lives although, in the end, Sentient AI is a military tool.