The US has unveiled an unusual new approach to saber-rattling with China: emotion predictions.

According to Reuters , military commanders in the Pacific have developed a tool to forecast how the Chinese government will react to American actions in the region.

A US defense official said the software calculates “strategic friction,” but provided little detail about how it works.

We tried to dig up further information — but unearthed more questions than answers.

How would the tool work?

The tool reportedly analyses data since early 2020 and assesses the impact of historical actions. It then predicts which future activities will upset China, up to four months in advance.

It’s hard to envision how such a system would work in practice. How is the training data validated? What information does it use to reach a decision? How is it built into the workflow of the military?  Could such a system really provide accurate predictions?

We asked Peter Lee, Professor of Applied Ethics and the Director of Security and Risk Research at the University of Portsmouth, for his thoughts.

Professor Lee, whose research focuses on AI-enabled weapon systems, was dubious about the tool’s potential:

Lee points to the example of China’s actions on the last day of COP 26. Few people predicted that the nation would insist on rewording the final statement from an agreement to “phase out” the use of coal-burning power plants to just “phase down” those plants instead.

“At a stroke, it allowed itself to pretty much do anything with coal for 50 years,” he said. “The political maneuver worked because it was unpredictable and timed perfectly to give the whole conference no choice but to accede to the demand immediately or lose the final agreed statement entirely.”

Trusting some Magic Eight Ball to envision such moves seems optimistic at best, particularly if it’s only analyzing data from 2020 until today.

What would it be used for?

The software reportedly predicts responses to actions including arms sales, congressional visits to Taiwan, and US-backed military activity.

The official quoted by Reuters said demand for the tool was sparked by incidents such as China’s response to the US and Canada sending a warship through the Taiwan Strait in October.

The US surely didn’t need a “tool” to realize that this action would antagonize Beijing. Didn’t its throng of human analysts could predict this response?

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks suggested the tool would play a supplementary role.

“With the spectrum of conflict and the challenge sets spanning down into the grey zone,” she said, per Reuters.

“What you see is the need to be looking at a far broader set of indicators, weaving that together and then understanding the threat interaction.”

I hope the US isn’t delegating its understanding of other nations to a machine — or letting AI determine military action. At best (or worst), I expect it would inform decisions taken by military bodies or civil leadership.

Why has the US announced its existence?

Tensions between the US and China are mounting. The nations are increasingly at odds over Taiwan, trade, technology, and governance. US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has described the relationship as “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century.”

The unveiling of this tool adds another element to the discord. When military powers divulge a new system, it’s because they want their rivals to know about its existence.

According to Reuters, the Pentagon wants to move budget dollars toward a military that can deter China and Russia. The promotion of the predictive tool could form part of this strategy.

However, we can only speculate about the motivations behind disclosing the software. The US may hope to intimidate China with the tech, add a veneer of data-driven “objectivity” to its decisions, or shape a deception campaign. It would certainly provide a new approach to plausible deniability .

Whatever the intentions, the next time that the US incurs the wrath of China, questions will be asked. Did they ignore the software? Did it make inaccurate predictions? Did they choose the antagonistic action?

What could possibly go wrong?

NASA unveils new weapon in the war on asteroids: An Earth-loving algorithm

It’s been 66 million long years since an asteroid erased the dinosaurs — and astronomers are getting antsy.

In the last few months, they’ve warned that space rocks as big as the Eiffel Tower , the Empire State Building , and the Great Pyramid of Giza could all miss Earth by just millions of miles.

In response, NASA is resorting to increasingly desperate measures. After simulating catastrophe impacts and slapping asteroids with spaceships , the agency on Monday unveiled its most outlandish weapon yet: an algorithm .

Named Sentry-II, the system will evaluate the threats posed by near-Earth asteroids (NEAs).

In a press release, NASA said the system can rapidly assess potential impacts for all known NEAs — with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million.

The software is an upgrade to the original Sentry, which has been in operation since 2002.

The first version of the system had several shortcomings. While it accurately modeled how gravity shaped an asteroid’s orbit, it didn’t integrate non-gravitational forces — such as sunlight heating the object’s dayside.

It could also struggle to forecast asteroids that come extremely close to Earth, as their motion gets erratically deflected by our planet’s gravity.

Sentry-II was created to overcome these limitations.

A key aspect of predicting asteroid impacts is modeling uncertainty. While the original Sentry made some assumptions about an asteroid’s orbit, the new software applies a different approach.

It first models thousands of random points throughout the “uncertainty region” of the rock’s trajectory. The algorithm then evaluates all the possible orbits within this entire area.

As a result, Sentry-II can assess low probability impact scenarios that its assumptive predecessor could have missed.

“Sentry-II is a fantastic advancement in finding tiny impact probabilities for a huge range of scenarios,” said NASA’s Steve Chesley, who worked on both systems.

“When the consequences of a future asteroid impact are so big, it pays to find even the smallest impact risk hiding in the data.”

Indeed, it can take eons before the full impact is revealed. Scientists only recently discovered that the dino-killing asteroid may have helped snakes to thrive on Earth .

The next devastating space rock could have even deeper repercussions. If the meme prophecies are to be believed, it won’t just obliterate humanity — it may also wreck the stock market.

Google will now warn you if your search results are probably crap

Your Google searches for breaking news stories may now produce a surprising outcome: a warning that your results could be unreliable.

The company has started showing notifications for searches on emerging topics, which suggest that users return later when more information is available.

The notice is Google’s latest efforts to mitigate misinformation in search results for breaking news. In a blog post, Danny Sullivan, public liaison for search at Google, said that sometimes reliable information isn’t online at the time that users search:

The feature was first spotted by Stanford Internet Observatory researcher Renee DiResta, who described it as a “positive step.”

Google has long been criticized for letting unreliable sources and conspiracy theories reach the top of search results for rapidly evolving stories.

Twitter and Facebook have faced similar accusations. Karen North, an expert in social media at the University of Southern California, told the New York Times in 2018 that users can game ranking algorithms in these situations:

The warnings may help stem the tide of misinformation, but they could also exacerbate concerns about Google censoring alternative media outlets.

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