Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Boston Marathon Bombings’ Guilty Verdict Exposed as a Gross Travesty of Justice

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With the official government narrative of the 9/11 attack filled with a plethora of lies that have since been subsequently exposed, the next biggest “war on terror” event on US soil that the feds failed to stop was the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. And now the lone living suspect from that horrific crime that killed three people, left 17 limbless and injured 264 victims (though that number’s been accused of being purposely inflated) has now been found guilty of all 30 counts after the jury’s 11 hour deliberation earlier this week. As we mark the second anniversary of this tragic event and the second and final phase of the trial beginning on Monday that will decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – whether he’ll live out the rest of his life in prison or be put to death, a critical review of preceding events and developments surrounding his high profile, extremely significant case seems both timely and much needed.
Despite Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleading not guilty to the 30 counts (17 carrying the death penalty) he was charged within a week after the April 15th bombings in 2013, his lead defense attorney Judy Clark several days ago conceded to the jury that her client was guilty in her closing argument. Apparently blaming the dead brother whose due process was denied became Dzhokhar’s only defense strategy. The defense team insisted that he was coerced and bullied by his older brother into committing alleged acts of terrorism. Considering no real solid proof other than photos placing Dzhokhar and older brother Tamerlan both wearing backpacks at the scene of the crime where the two bombs exploded was even presented at the trial, no justice for either the Tsarnaevs nor the many victims can possibly come from this guilty verdict.
If the purpose of the US judicial system in criminal trials is to ensure that all factual evidence surrounding an alleged crime or crimes be accurately and fairly presented so that the jurors can properly assess the best semblance of the truth as presented by both prosecution and defense in order for the jury to adjudicate and decide a defendant’s true guilt or innocence, this trial was a complete travesty of justice. And if a basic tenet of the justice system in the United States holds that a defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty, then again this verdict outcome is an obscene farce and a shameful joke exposing America’s justice system for its gross injustice. Just as the 9/11 commission failed to adequately address and answer dozens of questions that its official narrative failed to deliver, and years earlier the Warren Commission failed JFK and America, so does the prosecution’s case of evidence of Tsarnaev’s guilt fail to be convincing, much less provide definitive and unequivocal proof that the 21-year old Chechen American with his brother committed the Boston Marathon crimes.
And the prime reason why is that so much of the testimony and so called evidence was based on the FBI and local law enforcement’s dishonest versions of events that were based near exclusively on the government’s one star witness’s faulty, changeable, non-credible accounting of events. The identity of this sole witness who we don’t even know other than by his fake name “Danny,” claims that the deceased brother Tamerlan confessed that he and his younger brother were responsible for the Marathon bombings as well as the murder of the MIT campus policeman. Yet “Danny” never even testified as a witness at the trial. When the strength of the state’s evidence relies solely on one anonymous witness who’s never even sworn in to testify at the trial nor subjected to cross-examination on behalf of the accused, how can the trial verdict in any way be considered legitimate or fair? Virtually the entire guilt or innocence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev rested on what this one alleged witness claimed, yet he kept changing his story on numerous occasions.
The other so called incriminating evidence used against Dzhokhar was a bogus, totally unbelievable written confession that he is purported to have written in the dark on the inside wall of the boat he was hiding out in. Dzhokhar was supposedly laying there nearly bleeding to death from the alleged gunshot exchange with police a few hours earlier. Yet on video footage the young man is seen emerging unassisted from the boat appearing bloodless and uninjured only to be admitted minutes later to the emergency hospital room in critical condition suffering from a deeply sliced neck wound that prevented him from speaking for weeks. How did that happen while in police custody? And that came after a swarm of police shot a slew of bullet holes into the boat while Tsarnaev supposedly lay there gravely injured.
Just as the French authorities made sure that no prisoners were allowed to be taken alive in the alleged Hebdo Paris crime spree in January, nor in Osama bin Laden’s alleged execution in Pakistan in 2011, nor in the JFK assassination, that barrage of gunfire into that boat by FBI and/or local police was also intended to kill the only suspect. That way the government’s complicity, criminal involvement and subsequent cover-up would have conveniently been eliminated – wiped clean of any messy complications in the form of a suspect trial and the truth inadvertently leaking out. So the US government proceeds with a pseudo-trial that kept the defendant silent and unable to ever present his side of the story. In effect, he may as well have been silenced by the bullets intended to kill him.
Another of the dozens of discrepancies in this case is over how and when older brother Tamerlan actually died. A series of photos of a naked and handcuffed Tamerlan were taken as the police placed him into custody and inside a patrol car. Both CNN and the Boston Globe reported that Tamerlan was alive in police custody. Yet the feds’ official line was that after the brothers robbed a 7-Eleven, Tamerlan was killed in the Watertown shootout with the police while Dzhokhar backed the car over him as he made his temporary getaway. It can only be one or the other. The photos don’t lie. Cops do.
For so many incredulous inconsistencies to actually be accepted as convincing “evidence” while so many discrepant facts directly contradict state evidence, and then the “no questions asked” defense and mainstream media throughout the trial passively swallowing it hook, line and sinker in its rush to convict Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (trial being over in less than a month with 95 witnesses) is utterly preposterous and again, a complete and total miscarriage of justice. For nearly two years all the potential defense witnesses were constantly harassed, deported, jailed, and even killed, thus, virtually silencing any chance of a fair defense for Dzhokhar.
But then the propaganda lies built into this case from the start were designed to convict the brothers as the patsy fall guys all along. Going back to the JFK assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald, every false flag operation has its unwitting stooges who are used by the feds as props to take the sole blame. From President Obama to the FBI to their propagandist presstitutes, they were all publicly weighing in their guilty verdicts no sooner than the release of the photos that within days of the bombings identified the two brothers as the only prime suspects, thus prejudicing the entire case, effectively swaying Americans into believing that the one suspect still alive was guilty long before his trial ever began. And we know based on both Obama and the FBI’s track records that they both are constantly lying through their teeth and obviously cannot be trusted.  The overwhelming majority of American citizens per last August’s CNN poll, an all-time high of 87%, of Americans simply do not trust their own government, knowing that they are constantly being lied to every day. And with so many blatant holes in the state’s case, anyone half aware and informed of what’s been allowed to go down in the Boston Marathon bombings case would be near 100% certain that the government is once again producing an over-the-top false narrative designed to hide its own criminality. But then the US federal government’s become a militarized dictatorship, part of an international crime cabal that uses state propaganda as effectively as the Nazis ever did.
All kinds of unexplained anomalies are rampant throughout this case. A number of paid mercenaries from Craft International, a paramilitary private security contractor out of Texas (not unlike notorious Blackwater/aka Xe/aka Academi) were also spotted in photos wearing those same black colored government-issued-like backpacks. The question of whether any of them laid their backpack and its contents on the ground never quite came up in the trial. Apparently these guys were part of a Homeland Security training exercise that just happened to be training at the exact same time and place as the so called terrorists on that Boston Marathon day. Think about those odds, kind of like America’s entire national air defense on 9/11 conveniently being absent, purposely diverted to training exercises in the Atlantic just so the 9/11 false flag could be executed as planned. In Boston the unmistakable heavy presence of the military and special ops personnel assembled en-masse instantly on the scene after the marathon explosions is yet another giveaway indicating that the feds had something if not everything to do with this tragedy.
Clearly it was a training exercise alright, Bostonians was used as a guinea pig litmus test for assessing how a large US urban population of over a million people would react to a first practice, simulation dry-run of martial law in America, conveniently prepping us for what’s to come. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act upheld by the US Supreme Court a year ago now permits the US military to invade our homes without warrant, arrest us without charges, and imprison us indefinitely without trial, legal representation or due process. After the marathon bombings the feds’ stand down order issued over an expansive, densely populated metropolitan area to remain in their homes while a massive police state-army dressed and armed for war against its own people without warrants entered thousands of homes with automatic weapons drawn in the largest, monster-scale manhunt in US history searching for one teenager from a family with whom the feds were already very familiar.
Perhaps the most respected independent news team that’s been diligently investigating the Boston Marathon bombings the last two years – WhoWhatWhy – has asserted that older brother Tamerlan was most likely an FBI informant. Through court motions last year Dzhokhar’s defense team submitted evidence that the FBI had approached the older Tsarnaev brother in an effort to recruit him to spy on his fellow Boston Chechen and Muslim community. The US intel community has a verifiably long history both here and around the globe of seeking out troubled youth and young people like the Tsarnaevs as informants in its worldwide clandestine operations.
The FBI and CIA’s common misuse of paying informants to entrap others globally into joining plots of terrorism was well documented in researcher-author Trevor Aaronson’s book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. Between 9/11 and 2011 he confirmed that 508 defendants were recruited by informants paid up to $100,000 in multiple sting operations. In fact, in all but only three high profile cases were the FBI and their informants not involved. Again, this demonstrates that the US government’s calling card around the world reads “Terrorism-R-US,” just another M.O. for squandering hard earned taxpayer dollars to keep its invented “war on terror” very much ongoing and alive forever.
What seems most probable are efforts by the FBI to recruit Tamerlan to become a snitch in the neocons’ self-serving war on terror. Yet this piece of crucial evidence has been purposely withheld from all court proceedings and MSM’s dubious, half-ass coverage. 26-year old Tamerlin was a down on his luck, unemployed boxer whose dream of Olympic gold had been shattered, married to a nurse’s aide working 60 hours a week to make ends meet. YetWhoWhatWhy states that just two days prior to the bombings, Tamerlan could afford sending his mother in Russia $900 cash along with paying for the backpacks (or were they government issued?), ammunition and bomb-making materials. Yet this critical piece of information was also prohibited from further inquiry during the trial.
Of course the FBI predictably denied any Tsarnaev solicitation to become an informant. Prior to last month’s trial, the US Circuit Court judge presiding over the case explicitly ordered that the brother’s involvement with FBI not be allowed to enter his courtroom during the trial. It remains to be seen if Judge George A. O’Toole will permit the defense to present this critical information during the upcoming sentencing phase. Because the government has so much to hide and has failed to address so many discrepancies in the case for obvious high stakes reasons, it probably won’t be included, which of course only reinforces what many of us already know, that this trial is but a sham for police state propaganda and truth suppression.
Of all the receipts for typical everyday items purchased, the only receipts found in Tamerlan’s pockets were receipts for his self-incriminating bomb-making materials. That’s almost like finding the unblemished passport belonging to the lead 9/11 box-cutter a couple blocks from the towers’ ashes the day after, or the Hebdo gunman’s wallet with ID left carelessly on purpose in the cab so those terrorists could instantly be identified. This calling card pattern smacks of yet another inside job rendition with the same shabby, grubby fed fingerprints carelessly smudged all over it.
Another inconsistent weakness in the prosecution’s case was the sophistication required for making the “pressure-cooker” bombs used at the marathon. Supposedly Tamerlan learned off an al Qaeda internet website where the article’s authors mention the directions being beyond the scope of a novice. Throughout the trial, the prosecution team would go back and forth promoting the notion of the bombs’ complexity whenever it served their purpose. For example, as the reason used to justify the FBI interrogating Dzhokhar for two days straight without reading him his Miranda rights, the FBI suspected that others were also involved, partially based on the bombs seeming more than homemade-like. Yet whenever it would come up as a reason to mitigate seeking the death penalty, the notion of lone wolves would get drummed home every time.
The traces of bomb materials in Tamerlan’s apartment underwent the same flip floppy logic as a transparent prosecution ploy used to convict the younger brother. Three times the feds changed their tune on traces of the bomb material being found in the apartment and whether the brothers had outside help or not. These discrepancies consistently went unchallenged by the defense during the trial as if pre-scripted to let the shady government off the hook in its back and forth rendition of “truth,” protecting the feds’ cover-up lies of discrepancy in order to allow the US government to get away with its incriminating part.
The one thread of unfailing consistency throughout this entire two year story is the constant inconsistencies and the countless conspicuously avoided bottom line questions that smack of inside cover-up. Initially the Tsarnaevs were not the suspects. Apparently once the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon were made public asking for help in identifying their names, overheard on a Boston police scanner and then scooped up immediately by social media network sources, the names Mike Mulugeta and Sunil Trapathi were erroneously identified as the suspects. The fact that the FBI knew who the two men in those photos were because they had previous dealings with them enough to place them on a no fly list, the FBI willfully lied to America pretending it needed the public’s assistance to identify them. And then the police put out false names of innocent people as suspects. Mike Mulugeta reportedly was shot dead though any actual accounts confirming his death are completely absent. However, East Indian American and Brown University student Sunil Trapathi who had been reported missing since mid-March was found floating face down in pond water in Providence, Rhode Island about a week after the Marathon explosions. What little information about his suspicious death was released through his family and the question of whether the death resulted from foul play is still largely unknown.
More bogus, planted propaganda against the brothers shortly after they were identified as the prime suspects was the FBI claim linking them to the triple murder case in Waltham, Massachusetts that took place on September 11th, 2011. Only during the trial did it come out that there existed absolutely no evidence that Tamerlan was involved. Yet the systematic damage of misinformation supporting the brothers’ guilt was already done, ensuring that in the court of public opinion the Tsarnaevs were guilty as charged right from the get-go.
Here the Tsarnaev brothers were supposedly on a no fly list acting as more evidence supporting prior contact with intelligence agencies, yet Tamerlan was permitted to fly to known terrorist hotbed Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan from January 21, 2012 to July 17, 2012. His family members insist he spent his entire time with family, among them a distant cousin who heads a non-violent organization critical of Western policies toward Islam. Yet his visit was used by prosecution as so called evidence that the older brother was “radicalized” there and came home an inspired terrorist seeking revenge on America.
New York Times article dated April 20, 2013 suggests that Tamerlan was first approached by the FBI in January 2011 after a return trip from Russia. Russian intelligence services that monitored phone calls in Chechnya warned the FBI in March 2011 that Tamerlan was becoming a potential threat. Thus two plus years well in advance of the bombings, the FBI was already cognizant of Tamerlan’s extremist leaning activities. Yet the FBI allowed him to travel yet again to Russia despite being on a no fly list and less than nine months after his return from that final trip abroad, the Boston Marathon bombings occurred. This damning piece of government evidence makes the feds minimally guilty of criminal gross negligence if not actually a criminal accomplice.
Yet another despicable chapter to this tragic saga is the FBI’s murder of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend in Florida. Within weeks after the Boston bombings, an unarmed Ibragim Todashev was shot by an FBI agent previously reprimanded for excessive force as an Oakland police officer. Initially the FBI lied about the circumstances, falsely claiming Todashev wielded a knife. The victim’s family is suing the FBI for $30 million. Even after admitting the lie about the victim brandishing a weapon, the Justice Department (overseeing the FBI) and a Florida prosecutor cleared the murdering FBI agent of any wrongdoing. The official government’s response that in effect supports such egregious acts of violence toward innocent civilians strongly indicates that the victim knew too much and the crime syndicate’s answer for people aware of the feds’ evildoing is to systematically assassinate those who might incriminate the federal government. Neutralizing perceived threats is standard operating procedure.
As an aside, the Tsarnaev brothers’ uncle who went public shortly after the bombings blasting his nephews as “losers” was married for several years in the 1990’s to the daughter of well-known CIA career officer Graham Fuller. Fuller is the CIA architect for creating the Mujahedeen movement that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, the same outfit whose leader Osama bin Laden emerged as the so called 9/11  al Qaeda mastermind. Fuller was a committed advocate for using Islamic fundamentalists as US proxy war mercenaries. Another coincidence that the CIA VIP’s son-in-law and his nephews came from Chechnya, a hotspot for separatist Muslim terrorist activity?
Once again the United States government appears to be at least complicit in another state crime against its own citizens… and then applying a media blackout to any real investigative reporting that would ask the dozens of questions to get to the truth. Even the defendant’s legal representation abandoned Tsarnaev’s right to a fair trial, and by co-opting to act in accordance with the government’s “no questions asked” implicitly applied gag-rule, it too is complicit in this heinous crime for neither seeking the truth nor any real justice for either the defendants or the scores of victims. The US crime cabal and its fabricated “war on terror” is perpetuated globally, both on US soil and around the world as an ongoing crime against humanity. The truth behind 9/11 is in-our-face, and so is the truth behind these Boston bombings. The criminals in Washington must pay for their crimes.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/.

RUSSIA’S GIGANTIC NEW SPACE LAUNCH COMPLEX IN SIBERIA… AND SOME QUESTIONS

This important bit of space news was shared by Mr. S.D., and I'll bet you didn't see it on the American media. Indeed, this story, coming from the U.K.'s Daily Mail, is yet another indicator that something strange is afoot in space matters, for it appears within the same time frame as announcements of Russo-American space cooperation. Yet, as this article also avers, Russia is also competing directly with the USA in a new space race to Mars. Here's the story:
Putin's £3.5billion race to make it to space: First pictures inside huge Siberian cosmodrome from where Russia hopes to beat the US to Mars
Most likely the reader will be struck, as I was, by the sheer scale of Russia's new cosmodrome. Indeed, the references in the article to Stalin's vast infrastructure development projects recalls a typical Russian theme: the obsession with the gigantic, and the attempt to manage everything centrally through the mechanism of the surveillance state. At the minimum, it represents Russia's determination to remain a significant space power, for the Kremlin well knows that space will increasing be a major, if not the principal, measure of great power status in the coming decades.
But the gigantic new cosmodrome raises certain interesting questions and prompts a great deal of our trademark high octane speculation, not the least of which is that the sheer scale and cost of such an enterprise, merely to launch conventional rockets, would seem to be a strong contra-indicator to any idea of a secret space program utilizing hidden technologies and exotic propulsion systems. Why build such a vast complex, if indeed such technologies are anywhere close to practical deployment? I have no easy answer to this conundrum, other than to point out that some of the pictures in the article depicting launch gantries would seem to be capable of doing double duty, namely, launching big chemical bottle rockets... or possibly something else.
There are, however, other indicators that maybe something strange is going on at the new cosmodrome. There are the usual stories, somewhat typical for Russia, of corruption, profit skimming, late paychecks, and missing money. And here's where the high octane speculation comes in. Russia's space program has suffered in recent years from a number of catastrophic failures. Recall only the Phobos-Grunt mission, a mission to the Martian moon Phobos, which was to land, conduct radar tomography, retrieve samples from the moon's surface, and return them to the Earth for analysis. The reader may recall that the probe failed shortly after launch, and that the whole affair was blame on faulty computer hardware. But the reader may also recall that one Russian general opined that the probe was sabotage by the USA, using sophisticated phased array radar to do the trick, an allusion that many thought referred to HAARP. (See my article on this topic here: INDIA, MARS, AND A SABOTAGED SPACE PROGRAM?) So at one level, the cost overruns and endless delays in completing the huge complex might be due to sabotage within the project. This seems unlikely, however, as the Russian government has not yet issued any clear and unambiguous statement that it suspects such.
Then there is yet another feature of the cosmodrome that indicates something might be going on of a covert nature, and that is the fact that an entire small city is being built at the complex. It is this feature that suggests a strong covert possibility for the complex, as similar complexes with self-contained cities were built for Russia's nuclear weapons program and other secret research. And this raises yet another possibility, namely, that the cost overruns, the missing money, might represent the Russian equivalent of black budget money, being syphoned from the project for something else.
The bottom line here is, that howsoever one parses the meaning of this facility and story, we are probably only looking at 20% of the truth; the rest is carefully being hidden. Moreover, it cannot be mere coincidence that the facility is so close to China. This is one that bears watching.

Can the Military Make a Prediction Machine? April 8, 2015 By Patrick Tucker The planet is awash in open, free data. Can military-funded research turn it into a crystal ball?




Can the Military Make a Prediction Machine?

The planet is awash in open, free data. Can military-funded research turn it into a crystal ball?
What could the military do if it could better understand the massive amounts of data that humanity creates, an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes every day? Could it predict aspects of the future?


If Pentagon funds can help create—even partially—a machine capable of understanding cause and effect, or causality, and do so on the scale of thousands of signals, data points, and possible conclusions, then, perhaps, big data will reach its real potential: a predictive tool that allows leaders to properly position soldiers, police forces, and humanitarian relief long before the action starts.
Among the military programs probing this new realm is Big Mechanism, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. It seeks to turn machine-collected (or machine-generated) data into real insights into complex systems, and do so automatically.


Some, such as Wired’s Chris Anderson, have suggested that access to huge amounts of data, which makes correlational analysis easier, has made old-fashioned, theory-based science obsolete. But in a recent conversation with Defense One, DARPA program manager Paul Cohen said he was looking more to mechanize the human capacity for causation, rather than innovate around it. “We’re a very much aiming toward a new science, but we’re very much interested in causal relationships,” he said. “What we’re finding is that mathematical modeling of systems is very hard to maintain.”
The supply of data, it turns out, is growing too quickly for the human race to use it effectively to solve big problems. The expanding reach and power of computational intelligence is both cause and, at least potentially, cure.
“Having big data about complicated economic, biological, neural and climate systems isn’t the same as understanding the dense webs of causes and effects—what we call the big mechanisms—in these systems,” Cohen said last year. “Unfortunately, what we know about big mechanisms is contained in enormous, fragmentary and sometimes contradictory literatures and databases, so no single human can understand a really complicated system in its entirety. Computers must help us.”
These big systems can be as large as the entire world or as small as cancer cells, an initial area of focus for the program.
Machine intelligence can collect and process data on a scale unimaginable to regular humans. But processing data is very different from making sense of it, and from making predictions. If we could get computer systems to predict in the way that humans do, but with the data and processing power only available to massively interconnected systems, could we open up areas of the future to new inference? Cohen has suggested that the answer is yes.
“The beautiful thing about causal models is that they make predictions, so we can return to our big data and see whether we’re [retrospectively] right,” Cohen said. “And we can propose new experiments, suggest interventions and advance our knowledge more rapidly.” 
The ways in which humans interact with government, with one another, with medical facilities, transit systems and brands, etc. can predict events of national security significance. They can indicate, for instance, if a deadly disease outbreak is taking hold in a small rural community or if civil unrest is on the rise.
One example of that is the Open Source Indicators Program, launched in 2011 by from the Intelligence Advanced Research Programs agency. Led by program manager Jason Matheny, Open Source Indicators funds projects to predict events of national security relevance by monitoring tens of thousands of blogs, RSS feeds, news reports, social network chatter from sites like Twitter and Facebook, and other open sources.
Very early on, program participants began to generate some surprising results. In 2012, Virginia Tech computer scientist Naren Ramakrishnan, working solely with signals culled from the open Internet, effectively predicted both Mexico’s Yo Soy 132 protest movement, sometimes called the Mexican Arab Spring, and the “Friendship Bridge” protests that riled parts of Brazil and Paraguay.
Around the same time, Georgetown University data scientist Kalev Leetaru used a database of millions of open-source indicators to correctly (but retroactively) predict the spot in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama Bin Laden was found.
But for every instance where big data correctly predicted a big national-security event, critics can point to a big miss. Last year, for example, such indicators failed to predict the Ebola outbreak.
The military and national security communities have only begun to explore the potential of big data to solve these kinds of enormously complex problems. But before open-source signal hunting can reach its full potential, people like Cohen and Matheny need to answer some serious questions.
Among them, how to balance privacy concerns with national security objectives? Open-source intel is, by definition, freely available on the Internet. But when most people give their data away, they don’t imagine military technologists trying to extrapolate predictions from that data. As more people become concerned about how their data is used, especially by government actors, they’re changing the data that they make and release.
Last summer, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, discussed how the military had “completely revamped” the way it collects intelligence around open-source data. He said that, as the military’s reliance on such data grows, online behavior is changing and adapting. When asked if he was concerned by that, he answered, “Yes.”
Another question: how do we get machine intelligence to discover causation and not just correlation? How do you teach a big-data machine to provide a fully true answer, not just an output? Answer: we may need to re-design, on a fundamental level, the way we communicate with machines.
Perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes of the modern age is that our method for interacting with machine intelligence remains relatively crude: typing, and more and more with our thumbs. That limits our collaboration with machines to specific tasks with strict parameters.
When given a chance to collaborate with a machine or with a human on a project of any complexity, we’ll press zero to talk to the human almost every time. That’s a problem in a national-security context: service members are being asked to interact with an ever-larger number of systems in life-and-death situations.
Another one of Cohen’s DARPA programs, announced in February, seeks to change that. The Communicating with Computers effort seeks to “bridge the language barrier” between humans and machines, Cohen remarked in a press release.
Human-machine communication falls short of the human-human standard, where speakers and listeners consider such contextual aspects as what has been said already, the purposes of the communication, the best ways to express ideas, who they are speaking with, prevailing social conventions and the availability of other modes of expression such as gestures. And so computers that might otherwise contribute more significantly to solving problems in a range of areas, including national security, remain in relatively simplistic roles such as crunching large datasets and providing driving directions.”